The Dyrt is a Portland based startup that makes finding a spot to camp as easy as picking a hotel or restaurant. I helped form the first internal design team and managed a team of brand designer and writers. During my time there I helped build the brand from the ground up, educated marketing stakeholders on formal processes and had autonomy from the CEO to deliver a cohesive vision for the brand while meeting business goals.
Starting from scratch
I worked closely with the founders to redesign their existing logo. They had one request: incorporate a campfire. Aside from being a staple of the camping experience, campfires symbolize a gathering point, providing warmth, light, and a place to share experiences. These ideas correlate to The Dyrt's mission: Make camping accessible and attainable for all. In addition to the logo, I also designed marks and a badge for The Dyrt's Pro subscription service.
Color, iconography and illustration
Our team continued to build out the brand with a color palette to represent the outdoors, icons for the app interface, onboarding screens and modals, as well as illustrations for marketing materials.
Layering the pieces together
With a limited marketing and design budget, we found ways to make stock photography unique on its own by incorporating our illustration library and layering pieces to form collages. Below are some examples of how paid ads came together.
A new website for new branding
I worked closely with our product lead to create a brand new web experience. I introduced several strategies to appeal to a broad audience with: • Seasonal cards to show trending camping destinations • Hero images of campsite review photos from actual The Dyrt campers • Categories for ADA accessible and Indigenous-owned campgrounds • Custom banner to upsell our Pro membership
A premium subscription to The Dyrt
The Dyrt Pro is a premium membership offering perks like discounts on camping/outdoors products, a custom trip planner and Bureau of Land Management maps. A big part of my focus at The Dyrt was to work with marketing to think of tests we could run to create conversions.
Some of the ways we did this was creating a campaign for Black Friday, testing a gifting model and designing onboarding screens for the app that included pop up modals and alerts for locked Pro content.
A year in review
To show the camping community our expertise in the industry, we created a long scroll annual report that gave insights into trends like camping types, activities and top destinations. Also included are stats on what The Dyrt has achieved with it's community and user base over the last year.
Leaving on a high note
During my time at The Dyrt, the company saw 12 million more visits to the app and new website and over 2 million new reviews, photo and tips, and 6X times as many new Pro members than previous years.
Project role
Strategy Web design Branding & identity Illustration Art Direction
Team
Designers: Ali Kearney, Lauren Rockett Product: Jenn McHale Content writing: Sarah Rhodes
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