The Brochures That Inspired This Site

The first park brochure I ever picked up was a Salton Sea State Recreation Area guide, found in 2017 at the Alameda Point Antiques Faire. Dusty terracotta cover, a simple outline of the state with a star where the park is, Lydian typeface. I had no idea what I was looking at, but I knew I had to have it.

That was about a decade ago. My collection grew fast after that, mostly from estate sales and flea markets where someone's lifetime of park visits ends up in a cardboard box marked “paper stuff.” But the interest in old ephemera also turned me into a collector of new printed goods (it is not hoarding, I swear). Over the past five years I have driven from Alaska to Newfoundland to Mexico and back. On those trips I grab everything: modern brochures, trail guides, menus, baggage tags, anything printed. On one continental road trip the glovebox got so full I had to ship a box of it all back to California from a post office in Asheville. If I arrive at a national park visitor center after hours, I will post up for the night in the campground just to hit the gift shop in the morning for a pin or a sticker. Anything that pays homage to the designs of the past, I need it.

The vintage collection is somewhere around a thousand pieces now, mostly dating from the 1940s through the 1990s. NPS is the core of it, but there are California State Parks, Canadian parks, Forest Service, and a fair amount of state tourism material from agencies that no longer exist. On trips I read them front to back. The maps, the campground descriptions, the little safety warnings about bears. The writing is genuinely good, written by people who knew the parks and cared about getting the details right.

Of everything in the collection, the series I keep coming back to is the NPS pocket guides from the 1970s. They are the catalyst for these camping guides, and to explain why, it helps to start with the design history that produced them.

A Quiet Design Renaissance

By the mid-1960s, the National Park Service was in the middle of a graphic design overhaul that almost nobody outside the agency noticed. Vincent Gleason, who had led the Division of Publications since 1962, was pushing the agency toward the modernist design principles sweeping through corporate America and European institutions. The same International Style reshaping identities at IBM and Lufthansa. For the Park Service, that meant finally introducing color into what had been an entirely monochrome publication program. Commercial printing had been using color since the 1920s, but the Park Service did not follow suit for another four decades.

When color entered the interiors, it was deliberate. One or two accent tones replacing the black ink, sometimes producing an otherwise identical layout. Blue for water parks, brown for desert, green for forest. The AIGA Eye on Design has written about how these early NPS designs foreshadowed modern government graphic design trends: the same principles of clarity, restraint, and institutional identity that drive projects like the U.S. Web Design System today.

The Most Radical Thing the Park Service Ever Printed

Out of that foundation came the pocket guides, introduced in the early 1970s. QT Luong calls them “the most radical designs in the history of the visitor guides,” and he is right.

Each one measured just 3¼ by 5⅝ inches. The cover was a single solid color with the park name in a simple sans-serif. No photograph, no illustration, no arrowhead logo. Just color and type.

Every park got its own color. Glacier was blue. Shenandoah was terracotta. Yellowstone was a deep mustard. Haleakala was this searing orange that I still think about. The colors were not always consistent: Grand Teton showed up in kraft tan one year and slate blue the next. But the commitment to the idea was. A solid field of color standing in for an entire landscape.

The interiors were just as restrained. Monochrome photographs, a single map, and text written for brevity. By the 1970s, commercial brochures had been using full-color photography for decades. The Park Service held back. The photographs stayed monochrome well into the early eighties. Luong notes this may have paralleled “the disdain for color photography as an artistic medium exhibited in critical circles of that time.”

I think the real reason is simpler. When color photography does the talking, every park brochure becomes a postcard. Strip the cover down to a color and a name and the park becomes an abstraction, a mood, an invitation. You have to go see it for yourself.

California State Parks was paying attention. Their own brochure program in the 1970s adopted a strikingly similar approach: solid color covers, simple sans-serif type, each park assigned its own hue. Not a direct copy, but the influence was unmistakable.

The Pocket Guides Were Short Lived

In 1977, NPS Publications Chief Vincent Gleason enlisted Massimo Vignelli to create a unified design system for every park publication in the country. Vignelli was already famous for the New York City subway map and signage. The result was the Unigrid: a modular system built on 4-by-8¼-inch panels, Helvetica type, a distinctive black band at the top of every brochure, and standards flexible enough to work for both a two-panel leaflet and a twelve-panel fold-out map.

The first Unigrid brochure, Clara Barton National Historic Site in 1978, replaced the pocket guides overnight. Vignelli later said of the NPS project that “this one has affected more people than any other” in his career. He was probably right. The Harpers Ferry Center still prints about 20 million Unigrid brochures a year. In 1985, the system received one of the first Presidential Design Awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, which noted that the program “reduces routine decisions so that effort can be concentrated on quality.”

The Unigrids are brilliant and still in use today, nearly fifty years later. The typefaces have been updated from Helvetica and Times Roman to Frutiger and NPS Rawlinson, the photography is now full color, but the bones are unchanged.

The Unigrids solved the problem of standardization. The pocket guides did something different. A Unigrid tells you everything about a park in twelve panels. A pocket guide gave you a single bold color and a name, nothing else. That tension is what drew me to them.

Bringing It to the Screen

When Dan and I started building California Camping Guide, I wanted the design to lead with color the way those pocket guides did. A solid field of it, front and center, as a direct homage to that era of California State Parks and NPS prints.

Outdoor design today mostly lives in two lanes. There is the clean, minimal approach: sans-serif type on a white background, which I know well because that is exactly what I built at Hipcamp. And there is work that leads with illustration or photography, like Trevor Port's illustration for prAna or Brian Chorski's photography for REI Co-op. I admire both. They are doing some of the best creative work in the outdoor space right now. But I wanted something that sat outside of either, something closer to how the parks themselves used to show up on paper.

Wildsam is maybe the only outdoor-adjacent brand I can think of that has embraced those same roots: bold colors, bold typography, no photography on the covers. I like to imagine that their designers were looking at their own collection of pocket guides when they aligned on the creative direction for the brand.

So the homepage is a grid of brochure tiles. Each destination gets its own color and a name. That is it. Joshua Tree is poppy orange. Lake Tahoe is sky blue. Redwood is forest green. Death Valley is mustard gold.

I selected eight color scales and named each one for a place in California I have actually camped. If you have been to these places, you will recognize the colors immediately. Dune is the sand and dry grass of the coast. Redwood is the canopy up in Humboldt. Poppy is Joshua Tree at golden hour, named for the state flower. Sky is the Pacific from Big Sur. Dusk is the Eastern Sierra right after the alpenglow fades. Granite is Yosemite walls and Bay Area fog. Tide is the water off the Lost Coast. Marigold is the Central Valley in spring when the wildflowers take over.

Each destination is mapped to a color that tells you the landscape before you read a word. The dark theme shifts every destination to a deeper version of its color. Same information, different printing.

The Public Archive

I am far from the only person pulling these out of boxes. Brian Kelley's @npsmaps Instagram account is an incredible archive on its own, and his Parks books with Hamish Smyth and Jesse Reed at Standards Manual are the definitive collection: over a hundred years of NPS ephemera across two volumes. When Graham Hiemstra at Field Mag asked Kelley about the strongest era for NPS visual identity, he named “between the late 60s and 70s.” Smyth and Reed called it “probably the most inventive time” design-wise. I agree completely. That generation of graphic designers continues to inspire well beyond any of our shelves.

That is partly why I started The Public Archive. Paper is fragile, basements flood, estates get cleaned out, and the brochure your grandparents grabbed at Yellowstone in 1973 ends up in a box that nobody opens again.

The archive features hundreds of pieces published between 1901 and 1999 by public lands, tourism, and travel agencies in the US and Canada. I have digitized maybe two hundred of the thousand-plus pieces in my physical collection. Scanning is tedious. Each piece needs to be cataloged, dated, attributed if you can figure out who designed it. But these are primary sources that deserve to be accessible.

Less for More

Designer Jennifer Blanco describes the pre-Unigrid brochures as “a reminder of how to use less for more.” If there is a single idea behind this entire project, that is it. Let color do the work. Keep the type simple. Leave out anything that does not help someone find a place to camp.

I still have that Salton Sea brochure from the Alameda flea market. It sits on my desk next to my laptop, and when I look at it I see the same thing I saw in 2017: someone at the California Department of Parks and Recreation cared enough to get the color right, to pick the right typeface, to leave the cover mostly empty. That is what we are trying to do here. The best design California's parks ever had was the simplest, and it still works.

The brochures in the photos throughout this piece are from my collection at The Public Archive.