Cannabiotics

Marijuana’s creeping into legality across the US, which means someone had to figure out what to do about all those decades-old leaf logos and stoner clichés. Studio 360 and Original Champions of Design took the project seriously with Cannabiotics—a rebranded purple cannabis leaf, plus cookbooks, merch, something called Cannabamoji, and for completely unclear reasons, skulls scattered throughout the design.

Jennifer Kinon led the design team, which is funny because she’d never smoked weed in her life. She looked at the cannabis leaf and called it a little round Christmas tree. I loved that. The specificity of describing something you don’t understand, landing on something that’s both completely wrong and somehow exact. That’s the entire project in one detail.

You can interpret this as corporate co-option, domesticating something that existed outside the system. Or you can see it as design doing what design does—taking the world and deciding it could look better, function better, feel different. For cannabis, which has lived for years in either threat or kitsch territory, it’s actually a meaningful shift.

The skulls are still unexplained, and honestly I want to know what that conversation was. But I think Kinon being someone who’d never smoked is the key to the whole thing actually working. No baggage, no mythology built in. She just looks at the leaf and sees a Christmas tree. That’s the closest this project gets to being honest.