A new logo, a new beginning. A seed of change.

By Maxime Renaudin, Tree-Nation founder

A bit more than a year ago, I started receiving feedback that our logo was not very nice. What! I love our logo! It proudly and faithfully carried our brand for 15 years. True, we did improve it in 2017. From 2006 to 2017 it looked like this:

But in 2017 it lost a few branches (from its seven initial ones!) and was simplified to this version, which was frankly much better:

I listened to the feedback as usual, and it was very helpful. Our logo was too colorful for modern taste, and not practical to use because of this. The font was also too hippie. So it was time for a change. Not only because our logo was not of everyone's preference, but because Tree-Nation had also evolved. Our current logo, in a way, was not representing us very well.

It took one year and four designers to create our new logo. Each designer helped me significantly understand what the work entailed, the mistakes to avoid, and more. But in the end, we could not recognize ourselves with the results. Some drafts were very nice but not very Tree-Nation. Those delays were entirely my fault. I was too picky. But I wanted to make sure that this new logo would represent what we do. So maybe we should start there: what do we do?

Our job at Tree-Nation is to make tree planting easy so that change happens. We believe change should come from Citizens and Companies. Sure, change can also occur because of political influence, but if there's one thing that all humans share is the distrust for our politicians. So why should we bet our whole future hoping that our politicians will do the right thing for us? Social change is an option too, but it is too slow for the urgency of the crisis we face. There is one change driver that can be fast and that requires no political approval: technology.

That’s why we see ourselves as a technological solution. Solar panels and batteries will solve our energy pollution, electric vehicles will solve our transport pollution, but which technology will solve deforestation? This is where we believe we have a role to play. Our technology is simple: a web platform to fund reforestation. The problem is that there is no direct link between funding reforestation and citizens or companies. We, therefore, invented a set of tools to create the missing link between forests and citizens. The main tool we invented, created on the very first day of Tree-Nation, is the digital tree. It accounts for every physical tree planted and creates trust, traceability, and a sense of ownership allowing citizens and brands to participate in the reforestation of our planet. For me, it was necessary that our new logo could represent this virtual tree, this link between parties. So we began our design journey, using the concept of a circuit board.

But this tech design was missing something: the organic tree. Mixing digital and organic was probably our biggest challenge for this logo. In the end, it aims to be simple but still display 2 trees in one: a digital tree that acts like the DNA or backbone of the tree and an organic tree all around.

The logo project was very delayed and the team was rightfully getting impatient, so I tried to design it myself. After many attempts that I will not dare to show, one design seemed to work. Our internal design team put the final touches and tested some colors, and our new Tree-Nation logo was born.

So here it is. A new logo, a new beginning. A seed of change.

It always takes a bit of time to get used to changes but we hope you will identify with our new image as much as we do.