Background: Over the past year I have gotten to work with Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market on the delightful project of a fresh new logo and the accompanying brand book.

The Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market has been a fixture in Edmonton’s historic Old Strathcona area since 1983. The market is housed in a brick building next to the old firehall, in an area of town that has been around since 1891 – basically since the first railroad laid its tracks and brought the first trainloads of people and commerce to the community.

The Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market (OSFM) needed a logo and branding that upheld its historic roots, honouring both the market’s historic area and equally important, its old-time way of selling goods: local, hand-crafted, passing directly from the grower or maker to the customer’s hands.

After many different directions and iterations, and many filled sketchbook pages later, the new OSFM logo and brand book are complete! The new logo reflects the farm fresh qualities of its products (in the green palette as seen at the top of this post) and the red brick of the building itself. It uses Cambria, hand-drawn typography (appropriately) for the word “Old” and curved organic lines and flourishes inspired by the hand-drawn fruit and vegetable labels of the early 20th century.

Keep your eyes peeled for the new Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market website redesign that myself and local developer Lisa Hagen are working on, which will be going up sometime in February 2012! Visit osfm.ca.