Concept

Warpd Outdoors was founded by two Pop Punk bandmates who saw a gap in the market for fun, visually striking tents at music festivals. Their goal was to bridge the niche between festival-goers and the hiking/camping market with illustrated, highly graphic, yurt-style tents.

When they approached me, our initial discussion centered around keywords like “trippy, outdoorsy, grungy.” My early concepts leaned into a raw, scrawling death-metal aesthetic before evolving into a cleaner, yet still energetic, final logo, consisting of the tent and its surrounding landscape nestled around the wordmark.

Step 1. Branding

The brand identity expands from the logo, using a versatile palette of subtle, low-contrast, nature-inspired blues and greens, paired with a deep accent yellow for striking contrast. Variations were developed for single-color, two-color, and multicolor use, in both logotype and logomark formats.

Typography combines Calder, a semi-distressed, rounded, handcrafted typeface with a two-V “W” glyph, with Raleway, a clean Google font chosen for its accessibility for web and its distinctive “W” shape, like Calder’s. Deliverables included a full suite of brand collateral; invoice forms, letterheads, and business cards, alongside the brand guide and graphic assets.

Step 2. Illustration

Following my work on the brand identity, we began developing the tent illustration. Keywords here were “sharp, jagged, dark, nighttime.” After initial concepts featuring caves and dense forests, we settled on a mountainous landscape with a reflective lake, inspired by my own Colorado photography from my trip to Colorado. The artwork was drawn in Procreate, each layer was individually imported into Inkscape for vectorizing, then refined in Illustrator and fitted to the production dielines.

This project was a joy to work on, and Warpd Outdoors has been an amazing client from start to finish. I’m excited to see where they take the brand next.