A Wild Rye Rebrand with Two Toes Creative

MEET THE ARTIST: KIKA MACFARLANE. Designer of our Local Brew, Women Belong, and Change Maker graphic tees and ½ of the powerhouse team behind our new logo.

At Wild Rye, we believe in the power of art to enact change. Kika is the embodiment of this belief, and her deep creativity and unique and colorful perspective of the world is at the forefront of everything she does. Kika knows that the secret to creativity is play, which makes her one of our favorite people to collaborate with. Located in Hailey, Idaho, Kika is the West Coast half of Two Toes Creative - a two-woman creative studio reshaping the way we think about and approach creativity. In addition to creating incredible work for Planned Parenthood, the New York Times, and the Nature Conservancy, Two Toes is behind Wild Rye’s new logo. 

Keep reading to hear about the process from the Kika herself: 

Two Toes Creative partnered with the Wild Rye creative team on a 3-hour workshop to redevelop the visual symbol behind the Wild Rye brand. The feeling was that the current mountain symbol didn't effectively communicate the spirit and voice of Wild Rye, and didn't work well in different sizes and layouts. We started with Two Toes' Values to Visuals workshop, where we took the existing Wild Rye brand personality words and explored visuals associated with them. We free-wrote down everything we thought of when we pictured the Wild Rye brand, from the emotions to the visual experiences. We then sorted those brainstorms based on the brand personalities - putting aprés under fun and sisterhood under welcoming, for example. As we worked through this, we realized that the Wild Rye brand had a huge theme of duality - women who could value fashion and ride hard, push the pace in the alpine, and play and rest hard after. Our conversation started to center around how Wild Rye empowered women to be able to do both, to be anything, to not put themselves in a box. You can be a badass and still be feminine!

Afterwards Two Toes dove into symbol development, trying to bring creative energy around this duality idea and still have it feel connected to the Wild Rye brand. We explored pushing the current mountains further and focusing on where they overlap, we explored radial symmetry, like suns, flowers, and spokes, and we explored ways to represent the rye plant that were unique and distinguishable. When we were playing around with creating a rye symbol, we wanted to have duality exist in the rye. We played with having half of the stalk be dark and half be light, having diverse shapes make up the plant, and finally had the idea of simply spinning one side of the leaves. The result was instantly human and organic - it felt both cohesive and off-kilter, soft and strong, organic and minimal, and perfectly Wild Rye! We were so excited about the shape and found it worked really well in different applications. There was something about it that felt so feminine and elegant, while still being strong and impactful - just like the women Wild Rye supports. 

It was so much fun to get to work with the Wild Rye team on this project, and the thought and care that went into the brand development before the workshop paved the way for us to bring really intentional visuals to life!! 

Follow along on Kika’s creative journey at @kikamack and @twotoesco !