Countdown to Camping

Design lead – Graphic design & Illustration

Post-COVID, Canadians were ready to get outside. We gave them something to get excited about.

Coming off a COVID-affected 2020 camping season, MEC wanted to rebuild momentum early in 2021 — building excitement and anticipation ahead of what we hoped would be a full return to the outdoors. Countdown to Camping was the campaign we created to do that. I designed the full campaign branding: a bright, illustrated visual system with custom iconography that stretched from national storefronts to social media, email, and digital advertising. The brief was to feel joyful and energising — the visual equivalent of that feeling when you finally get to go camping again.

System design

I created a complete illustration suite for the campaign — trees, mushrooms, foliage, wildlife, and outdoor gear motifs — drawn in a consistent style that worked at both large format (window vinyl, in-store) and small scale (social assets, email headers). The colour palette was deliberately bright and optimistic, a deliberate departure from MEC's typically more restrained outdoor aesthetic.

National rollout

Assets were deployed across storefronts nationwide — one of the largest physical rollouts I'd led to that point. In addition to in-store, I produced the full suite of digital assets: social posts and stories, paid social, email creative, and web banners. All designed and produced in-house, without external agency support.

Our social activation

To drive home the hype for camping, we created a social contest. I designed the branding and design system which included illustrations, colour palette and type treatment which were pulled together into a toolkit for our social media team to leverage. I wanted this to look visually distinct so as to stand out on our social channels but could also live together with the rest of the camping collateral.

Bright, joyful, and everywhere.

Countdown to Camping is one of my favourite projects because the brief was purely emotional — make people feel something. The result was a campaign that showed up consistently across every surface, with an illustration style distinctive enough to recognise instantly.