What I Learned at AIGA Maine Design Fest 2026: Hearts of Pine & Building Something that People Can Belong To
A little over a month ago (I’m late, I know) I headed up to the Portland Museum of Art for the yearly AIGA Maine Design Fest. I was only able to attend the morning session, cause girls gotta work, but it was more than worth the trip.
The first session was called “The Minds Behind the Hearts,” presented by Josh Lane [VP of Marketing @ Hearts of Pine] and Burke Cherrie [former Executive Creative Director @ Hearts of Pine]. They walked us through how they built Hearts of Pine from the ground up. As someone who sees Hearts of Pine everywhere (and I do mean EVERYWHERE, there’s a garage right behind our studio proudly showing off their HOP stickers), I expected the talk to be about the design of the brand. And it was, but not in the way that I was expecting.
If you’re a Mainer, you already know – Hearts of Pine is a soccer club, but it’s also something that has rallied the community and cultures of Maine to represent and benefit everyone who lives and works here. It’s a BIG SWING for a soccer jersey in a state that previously had no hard and fast affiliation with soccer, but we’ve seen it done before. What brought Hearts of Pine to life wasn’t the design work (though obviously people love that too) it was everything that the brand stood for. Including all the folks represented in the state of Maine.
A culture of subcultures
To steal a headline directly from the presentation, one of the first things these gentlemen spoke around was that “typical Mainer” is not what you think. We are not one thing, we are a fishing community, college towns, cool old mill cities, artsy spaces, some of the best outdoor experiences in the world. Maine isn’t a trope, it’s a million things in one excellent spot. Now how could they possibly convey that in one brand?
Instead of building a brand to represent Maine they wanted to build one that, at its heart, was every Mainer in some shape or form. It let people see themselves in it, but also still showed a unified club and state.
Emotion by design
The phrase that I thought about all the way home was ‘emotion by design’. I recently read a book by the same title, talking about Nike and how they built that brand with creative leadership. So what does emotion by design mean? At least to me? It meant that that’s where they started. Designing with emotion as the actual material. From the initial concepts, all the way to the final product, emotion was the key to building Hearts of Pine, and in looking at their stuff, you can see it in every single thing.
And not in a predatory way. In a lot of marketing, you find that ads are preying on people by using emotion. Here they’re using emotion as the driving force, not to connect you to buy something, but to connect you to be a part of something that could be great, if only you were there.
Democratizing access through the creative village
The other primary idea that really stuck with me is the idea of a creative village. ‘It takes a village’ and all that. And it truly did, Hearts of Pine didn’t build the brand from three brains in a conference room, they built it with locals, local photographers, artists, designers, lobstermen & women, college students, and the like. The brand was built, in part, by the people in the community, and that’s something real special if you ask me.
Leading with your heart
Put all of that together and you find something pretty cool. Something that resonates with an entire state of people who are unlike each other in most ways, but can get together to build a soccer team out of thin air. Leading with your heart involves the potential for messiness but also the potential to create something legitimately magical.
I walked into the morning session thinking I’d be learning a bit about branding, and instead I learned what I already knew in my heart, that people love brands and communities who are authentic, awesome, and supportive of their communities.
I had a lot of thoughts immediately leaving this talk, but the one thats still hanging in the back of my mind is ‘am I designing what a client wants without thinking about the community that surrounds them?’. You can see it in a lot of our work, we love our community. But I wonder if sometimes I push too hard to create community where there is none. How do you build something like this from nothing? With heart.
