Harmony Extracts is a cannabis concentrate company that uses state-of-the-art extraction technologies to transform marijuana plants into potent concentrates. A new enterprise based in Denver CO, Harmony commissioned Pentagram to design its brand identity and packaging for the initial line of products. Rejecting the head-shop look of the bygone days, the Pentagram team decided to align the brand with the growing number of modern, clean, high-end dispensaries “that seemed to be on a mission to become the Starbucks of the cannabis retail world.”
Early in their brand identity explorations, the DJ Stout and the Austin TX office landed on the idea of using an image of a hummingbird, with distinctive marijuana-leaf shaped tail feathers, as the symbol for Harmony and its line of extracts. A hummingbird, “nature’s little extractor,” is an energetic participant in the natural ecosystem. The resulting “Harmony Hummingbird” symbol was paired up with the typeface Verlag to complete the main identity lockup for the brand.
For the launch, Pentagram designed a set of three boxes for shatters, waxes, budders and sugars — different forms of cannabis concentrates — that come in small, branded glass jars, and another set of slider boxes for Harmony’s distillates which are ultimately consumed with vape pens. The designers organized Harmony’s products into three main strains of cannabis: “sativa,” “indica,” and “hybrid.” Each of the three strains was assigned a color indicator based on their mood generating profile: a warm, energetic magenta/orange hummingbird logo is used in the packaging scheme for the sativa strain; a cooler blue/purple range for indica; and a yellow/green bird represents the hybrid strain and is used as the main color for the overall brand. The different colored hummingbirds are positioned against a black packaging scheme printed with matte ink and finished with a “soft-touch” coating. Interiors of the boxes and other containers pick up the color ranges of the three strains.
