Two years ago, the good people at the Camp Fire USA River Bend Council asked me to work up a T-shirt design. The result was the basic illustration you see on the left.

Created fairly quickly and without a tremendous amount of planning or forethought this illustration turned out to be really popular both with the staff and campers and was eventually adopted as the official logo for Camp Tannadoonah which is an overnight camp in southwestern Michigan. (I’ve yet to have one of my marks tattooed on anyone’s body. For the time being, the Tannadoonah mark drawn on concrete with sidewalk chalk is the best I’ve been able to achieve.)

Unfortunately that left the day camp, Camp Tawanchi without a comparable logo. The challenge was to design a mark for Tawanchi that fit with the existing branding of Tannadoonah while still remaining distinct. Where Tannadoonah is all about spending a week in the woods in a traditional summer camp setting, Tawanchi is more about bringing a touch of that camping experience into the city. Tawanchi campers spend the day at “the Res,” a building located in one of South Bend’s city parks. The intent was to reference this building as a symbol for the Tawanchi experience and to render it in the rough style already defined in the existing Tannadoonah mark.

Both marks were created using expanded brush strokes in Illustrator. The thin font is Myriad Pro Light and the thicker serif font is the extremely elegant free font Nevis, which is available here. I think Nevis compares favorably to the far more expensive (but incredibly beautiful) sans face Gotham from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.