America’s Forests

America’s Forests works to protect and restore the country’s woodlands and the ecosystems that depend on them. Conservation is a story-driven cause: to earn support, it has to make people feel what is at stake, then show them how to help.

The organization needed a brand and website that could carry that story with the weight it deserves, without getting lost in jargon or losing the visitor along the way.

The site is built around a person and a place. The forest carries the emotion in full-bleed photography, and a deep olive holds the type so the words never fight the trees. The mark is a badge, two conifers inside a frame, the kind of thing that works burned into wood or printed on a cap.

Structure follows the ask: the story first, the mission second, and How can I get involved? repeated as the one action, with partnership and donation routes never more than a scroll away. Built responsive, so the same narrative pacing survives on a phone, and with the news and blog set up for the team to keep publishing.

The brand had an unusual advantage: its founder is genuinely two people. Chuck Leavell has played keyboards with the Rolling Stones since 1985, and he studied forestry by correspondence while touring in the eighties. With his wife Rose Lane he turned her family's land near Macon, Georgia into Charlane Woodlands, an award-winning tree farm.

That is the reason the site is built on a person rather than a logo. The series travels the country, from Oregon and Colorado to Maine, Minnesota, Arkansas, Wisconsin and Georgia, meeting the architects, artists and landowners who live off and look after the woods. The line it all hangs on is theirs: we celebrate America's forests and advocate for their constructive management.

So the design leads with his face and the forest behind it, and the writing stays in his register: warm, specific, never lecturing. The badge mark, two conifers in a frame, is built to sit over photography and to burn onto wood just as well.

America’s Forests now has a digital presence built to move people, one that tells the conservation story clearly and gives supporters a straightforward way to stand behind it.