In designing the website that would become the digital platform for Uncommon Fruits, we posed a series of questions that would help us render the expression, editorial principles, and choreography of the site. In these questions, metaphors began to emerge that would eventually become operative – terms would become seeds, and seeds would become icons, and icons would be dispersed across the site as writing continued to be added by the group's members. At first, the website would feel sparse, or maybe dormant, but as its phases changed, synchronized with the orchard, new ideas would propagate and grow beside one another.

Below are the questions that we began with, and in some way, we hope the website and visual world of Uncommon Fruits has offered answers to them. 

What is the fruiting body of an idea?
Why is what, where? And when?
How can a website be connected to cycles outside of itself?
How can ideas move through a website beyond the chronological and categorical?
How can keywords propagate in un-expected places?
What could icons as seeds look like?
What indicates change on a website over time? 
How can a website operate on multiple time signatures; one of ongoingness, and one of phenological phases?
How can a website be more like a biennial than a perennial?
How can a website function not just as communication but as cultivation?

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Companion–Platform is an independent design studio and creative practice specializing in communication design and conceptual worldbuilding, founded by Lexi Visco and Calvin Rocchio. We are based in Berkeley, California, within what was once the Codornices Creek watershed, and on the unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people.
Companion–Platform designed the identity and the website of the Uncommon Fruits project.

This article was published originally in Robida 11 orchard/frutteto/sadovnjak.