The Sprout Fund Spring Program offers grants to organizations and individuals for projects in the Pittsburgh region focused on biodiversity.

Bearded was asked to brand this new program – working with The Sprout Fund to develop the name, tagline, and logo – and design a print "teaser" card to raise awareness, and encourage applications for the new grants. We employed custom-printed woodblock textures and 2-color overprinting in the printed piece, to achieve an approachable hand-made aesthetic that could be printed on a tight budget and timeline.

To add some variety into the cards we designed three versions showcasing different animals from the region, and printed the run on two different colors of French Speckletone paper. The paper is one of our favorites for appearance and environmental concerns – it's FSC-certified, contains 30% post-consumer recycled content, and was created using French's own river-based hydroelectric power.

Once the teaser was in place, we followed up with an informational Wordpress-based website and a print piece that does double duty as a poster and brochure for the program (again on environmentally-conscious French paper).

The final event for the Spring Program project was the 2011 Biodiversity Festival. For this Bearded designed and printed a 2-color letterpress poster. The poster was printed by hand at the Bearded office in Pittsburgh on our World War II-era Vandercook No. 4 printing press.