Brand Identity & Web Presence

Founded by two former park rangers, the organization had started with a logo sketched on a napkin and a website built from a free template. Ten years later they were serving 3,000+ participants annually, partnering with school districts, and applying for national grants — with a brand that still read as a weekend project.

The website was slow, not mobile-friendly, and buried program registration three levels deep. Mobile was 70% of their traffic, and mobile users were the ones giving up.

I interviewed the founders, four program leads, and a dozen past participants, including the parents and teachers who refer students. The founders had a clear vision they'd never articulated visually: serious enough for grant applications, approachable enough for a 14-year-old finding them on Instagram.

The competitive scan showed two visual camps in outdoor education: corporate-nonprofit (stock photos, blue-green palettes, generic trust signals) and rugged-outdoorsy (distressed textures, adventure photography). Neither fit an organization that teaches wilderness survival alongside environmental science curriculum — genuinely playful, technically rigorous.

Brand exploration started with mood boards and word association with the founding team. We landed on three attributes: capable, inviting, grounded. I developed three logo concepts around different metaphors — trail marker, compass rose, mountain ridge built from the initials. The compass rose won and went through 15 refinements until it held up from favicon to billboard.

The palette came from the regional landscape: deep forest greens, warm sandstone, and a wildflower accent. For the site, I wireframed mobile-first and treated the registration flow as the centerpiece — a 3-step progressive form with inline validation and save-and-return, for parents who start on a phone and finish on a laptop.

Deliverables: a 40-page brand guidelines document, a full logo system, an accessibility-validated palette, typography specs, photography guidelines, and a responsive Next.js site.

End-to-end ownership is where I do my best work. The logo informed the animation language. The brand voice informed the microcopy. The build constraints informed the design. Those threads get cut when the work is siloed across agencies.

The moment that stuck: one of the founders seeing the final site and saying, "This is who we've always been, we just couldn't show it before." That's the job — not inventing an identity, revealing the one that's already there.