They Sent Us One Logo. Nothing Else.

How one event logo became a tree-ring medal that turns the color of wood in sunlight.

The brief for The Rooted Half Marathon & 5K was one attachment:

the event logo.

That was it.

At the center was a tree, its roots spreading below, with two runners and a dog on the trail.

We could have simply turned that logo into a medal.

Instead, we started looking at what was already inside it.

The Rooted. A tree. Roots.

And that led us somewhere else.

What If the Tree Became the Medal?

The logo already showed us the tree from the outside.

So we looked at it from another angle:

What would we see if we cut through that tree?

Tree rings.

That became the structure of the medal.

Instead of placing the logo inside a standard circle, we surrounded it with growth rings and gave the outer edge the irregular shape of a tree trunk.

The original logo remained at the center.

But now the medal itself had become an extension of the idea behind it.

Then we took it one step further.

What Color Should a Tree Become?

If the medal was going to take the shape of tree rings, we didn’t want the connection to stop at the shape.

Wood has a color.

So instead of simply making the medal brown, we used a sun-activated color-changing effect to let it become brown.

Indoors, the tree rings appear pale, almost white.

Take the medal into sunlight and the color begins to change, moving into warmer brown and earthy tones.

The stronger the sunlight, the deeper the effect.

The medal doesn’t just look like a cross-section of a tree. In sunlight, it starts to become one.

That’s why the color-changing effect belongs here.

It isn’t an effect added after the design was finished.

It’s part of the design itself.

And Then There's the Dog

There was one more detail in the original logo: the dog.

That wasn’t there by accident.

So we carried that part of the event onto the reverse of the medal.

A ring of paw prints runs around the edge, bringing the dog element into the design while continuing the circular rhythm established by the tree rings on the front.

Front and back tell different parts of the same event.

One Logo Was Enough to Start

The Race Director sent us one logo.

From it came the tree-ring structure, the irregular shape, the sunlight transformation, the wood-inspired color, and the paw-print reverse.

None of those ideas needed to be invented separately.

They were already hiding inside the event.

The design work was finding them — and connecting them in a way that made the medal feel unmistakably The Rooted.

That’s what makes custom race medal design interesting to us.

Every event gives us something different to work with.