THE CLIENT
Team Sierra, a program of Sierra Club – the nation's largest environmental grassroots nonprofit – was planning their annual City Hikes, an awesome initiative where participants fundraise money to protect our planet, then on the day of the event get to hit the trails in their own neighborhood.
THE GOAL
The client needed promotional materials for the City Hike events. There were two cities whose hikes were coming up in September 2021: Los Angeles and Boston. Team Sierra wanted collateral for these events, with the goal of meld together the two competing ideas of cities and hiking. How to design for a hike in a city?
A CONTRAST BETWEEN NATURAL AND GEOMETRIC
The generic geometric cityscape featured on the t-shirt was created by one of the full-time designers at Sierra Club's creative team – I supplemented with typography. I chose a rough typeface to contrast the sharp edges of the city lines, and aligned the type a way that resembles the ups-and-downs of a mountain range. For the rest of the collateral, I created my own illustrations of Los Angeles and Boston inspired by the generic city graphic.
T-SHIRTS AND POSTCARDS
For production of the zero-waste t-shirt, Team Sierra partnered with East/West, a sustainable and gender-neutral shop based in Los Angeles. All the shirts they use are made from reused, overstocked, or deadstock materials that would have been landfill if they didn't get this second chance at life as a super-cool t-shirt.
I pulled that same typographic style from the t-shirt into the postcards to really emphasize the city name. For the Boston postcard, I was able to recreate the illustration style and make a completely new Boston skyline. The postcard shares important information on City Hikes, including how to register for their neighborhood City Hike and what participants receive with registration.
THE FLIERS
The fliers were pretty self-explanatory, as I wanted to keep with the rest of the theme of clean cityscape paired with textured type.
Overall, this was such a fun project to work on. It was a fun puzzle to build off each piece to create the next!
"Rachel jumped in twice in 2021 as a freelance designer for a total of 6 months here at the Sierra Clubs in-house design studio. Two of our designers went on back to back sabbaticals in 2021, and both times Rachel came through. She was a quick learner in how we work with the campaigns here, and most importantly she turned projects around very quickly with lots of design thought given to each project she worked on. She was equally as good at talking directly with the campaign folks when troubleshooting needed to happen directly with the studio. Sure wish I could have offered Rachel a permanent position but our studio is small and not able to expand at the moment. Hire Rachel for projects big and small."
– Peter Walbridge (he/him)
Sierra Club National Creative Director
Sierra Club National Creative Director