Canopy

There's a teenager in Seoul who taught herself to build apps by talking to a machine. She's never written a line of code. She has 40,000 users.

There's a guy in a garage in Phoenix who's been printing the same drone chassis for eleven weeks because he can't get the weight distribution right. He doesn't have an engineering degree. He has a 3D printer.

Different worlds. Same instinct. Obsession.

The thesis

In a forest, individual trees don't coordinate. They just grow. They push upward because that's the only direction that makes sense. When enough of them grow tall enough, their branches start to overlap. From below it looks like one structure. It's not. It's hundreds of separate things that grew until they found each other.

That structure has a name.

Canopy.

The walls between software, hardware, and media have collapsed. The kid building an agent and the kid building a robot and the kid building a channel are using the same tools, thinking the same way, solving the same problem: how do I make something from nothing and get it in front of people? Until now, there was no program that looked at all three and said: you're the same. Come here.

The numbers

• 6 weeks — April 8 to May 22
• 10,000 applications
• 5,000 accepted
• 150 on-campus at Fort Mason
• $250,000 in funding + $500,000 in credits at Canopy Festival
• One leaderboard, three worlds, all in the same room

My role

I led brand, visual identity, and the funnel for Canopy from naming to launch:

• The name — the forest-metaphor pitch, the single-noun callback pattern
• The visual identity — wordmark, color, motion, typography, photography
• The launch site and acceptance flow
• The application funnel — copy, design, conversion
• The Canopy Festival identity — the demo-day event format
• The community design — Discord sections by world (software / hardware / media), leaderboard mechanics, badge system, weekly live-roast structure

The design problem

Canopy had a positioning problem before it had a design problem. Three worlds that don't usually talk to each other. A founder culture that defaults to one (software) and treats the other two as adjacent. Media people don't think of themselves as founders. Hardware people don't think of themselves as builders the same way software people do.

The brand had to flatten that. Same identity, same leaderboard, same room. The forest metaphor did the heavy lifting because it allowed three things to be one thing without erasing the difference between them. Trees stay trees. The canopy is what they make together.

Visually, the language pulls from natural systems — overlapping forms, weight distribution, mass-without-shape. Type stays disciplined and product-grade. The contrast is the point.

What shipped

• Landing page, application flow, acceptance pack
• Festival branding for the demo day
• Discord identity and the leaderboard system
• Section vibes — Artists, Films, Vibe Coders, Hardware Builders
• Live-roast format and visuals — public feedback, real-time, on stream
• Demo-day video templates for the 150 on-campus builders