I served on the staff of Woodruff Scout Camp for 3 summers. It’s a camp for members of Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America) in which campers come to Blairsville, GA for a week and participate in numerous activities, most notably taking classes to earn the merit badges they need to rank up to Eagle Scout. The camp is divided into program areas based on merit badges taught, and I was a staff member of the STEM area for one summer, and STEM Director for the following two.
Throughout my tenure, I developed several branding elements for the STEM area, both for the area as a whole and for specific programs we ran.
I first designed this general use logo, which is inspired by features from the camp’s logo, including the “W” and the arrow circling the inside edge. I adapted these into a more futuristic “W” and a spaceship, paying homage to our model rocket launching program.
Next, I made a series of logos for the STEM After Dark program I developed and implemented with my staff. This was a large scale campwide event with 300+ scouts coming through and experiencing several fun and educational activities at night, accented by UV lights. I wanted visual representations to be futuristic and “glowy”. I also made a map and PSA slide to put on a TV in the lobby.
After STEM After Dark, my next project as director was an older scouts program where scouts earned several merit badges while working towards one big project. I worked with the previous director to design two different pitches to management– one about CAD and 3D printing called Woodruff Inventors, and one about making video games called Woodruff Game Studios. Inventors ended up winning (it was my favorite anyway), but I was really happy with how the graphic design I did for both pitches turned out. The main constraint I followed with these designs was to keep the gear motif but the rest should be directly inspired by the program itself.
During the offseason, I put together a social media post for National STEM Day to tease the new programs we would be implementing in summer of 2024:
Finally, I had a random idea to make taking both our Astronomy and Space Exploration badges at the same time into it’s own little mini-program with a patch or sticker scouts could buy and to stylize both as if the scouts were actually working at a space program. This idea fell through, but I was super happy with the logo I made for it on a random Sunday morning:
Cool note– the three four-pointed stars make up the Summer Triangle, a constellation that only appears in the summer that we talk about in the Astronomy merit badge class.
I also designed the first prototype of Woodruff Staff-opoly, and then then worked with the team from Late For The Sky, who make all of those city and college monopoly games you see in gift shops, to design and manufacture an official version. Here’s the prototype I designed:
