Camps with Meaning is the camping ministry of Mennonite Church Manitoba and operates two summer camps in southern Manitoba.
Camp Assiniboia is nestled in mature river bottom forests and meadows on the banks of the Assiniboine River only 16 km southwest of Winnipeg.
Camp Koinonia is located on the shores of Lake Max in Manitoba’s Turtle Mountain Provincial Park in the southwest corner of Manitoba. In addition to summer camp programming, both camps operate as year-round retreat centres.
Year on year, Mennonite Church Manitoba had hired designers to create brochures and graphics ad-hoc with relatively little standard visual look. The office was looking for something a little more refined and established that could be used as a template year after year.
I was approached by Camps with Meaning to create a new template for its summer camps brochure. They also wanted a rentals promotional brochure specifically for Camp Assiniboia.
I suggested that there should be an overarching look and feel for Camps with meaning materials that could be used to build both the summer camps brochure and Camp Assiniboia rentals brochure.
The designs we created are much more minimal, unapologetically taking extra space for breathing room and keeping images contained in frames, resting atop the pages as opposed to filling them edge to edge.
Not your typical summer camp
Camps with Meaning is relatively unique in the realm of Christian camps, and it felt important to me that the brochures communicate this implicitly. For decades, camp staff have written music together and built an incredibly rich body of camp songs and worship music. This is on top of the rich choral tradition the camps draws on through its Mennonite heritage. The two camps are also known for being exceptionally welcoming to non-Christians, campers with mental and intellectual disabilities, and LGBTQ2SIA campers.
Trading busyness for emotional clarity
While the layout is more minimal and less busy than the average camp brochure, the open white space, beautiful photography, and crisp bold typography go a long way to communicate joy, fun, exploration, and good taste.
Colour-coding
Many, if not most, camp brochures I've seen tend towards a large amount of chaos, thrusting heaps of imagery at the viewer in hopes of convincing them that the camp will be a fun exciting place for their kids. However, overwhelming readers is a huge mistake. A single brochure has to showcase many different programs, break down which age groups they are for, and explain when they happen and at which camp they take place. A good camp brochure needs to help the reader sort comprehensive information.
A key choice I made was to colour-code the two camps as soon as possible, starting with the cover itself. This immediately gets the viewer thinking in terms of two places and made program schedules easier to label, maps more intuitive, and the two locations more distinctly differentiated in their camps pages. Inversely, the absence of either of the camps' colours on a page tells readers the information is not specific to either camp.
Unique Typography
Two typefaces from Japanese designer and experimental artist Yamaoka Yasuhiro (YOFonts) provide both expressiveness and clean minimal legibility. Classiq, a vivid humanist sans originally conceived of as a Garamond Sans, provides titling. Type enthusiasts will recognize a similarity to the Mr./Mrs. Eaves super family, crashing the overall impression of Garamond with the shape and feel of Gill Sans. Throw Classiq into its italics at the heavier weights, however, and the design takes on a whole new sleeker, crunchier dimension that really suits a camping brochure. Longer text is set in Eau Douce Sans, which somehow manages to pull together features of Avenir, Frutiger, and Univers into a distinct and highly legible Grotesque.
The rentals brochures were created from a similar typographic cloth, but with a touch less flair, opting for less open space and a simpler showcasing of the facilities available for rent.
Both brochure templates remain in use to this day and have seen updates in successive years.
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