The seven Leave No Trace principles↗ have long served as the official ethical guidelines for U.S. public land agencies (National Parks↗, Forests↗, etc.). This adoption gives them the potential to reach a staggering 500 million↗ outdoor visitors each year. But there’s a catch: these principles were originally created for experienced, backcountry recreators, while today’s outdoor spaces are increasingly filled with newer, more casual visitors. In fact, research shows that most environmental impacts are caused by this growing group of first-time and casual recreators.

With outdoor participation growing every year, it became clear that Leave No Trace needed to evolve. The challenge was to reposition both the brand and its messaging to connect with a broader, more diverse audience that included everyday park-goers, urban green space users, and weekend adventurers. This shift would ensure the principles remained relevant, approachable, and actionable for everyone, not just seasoned outdoor enthusiasts.

Leave No Trace doesn’t sell a product, it sells a set of principles that ask people to voluntarily reduce their impact on nature. In practice, this often means encouraging outdoor visitors to invest extra time and effort into activities like careful planning, waste management, and responsible food storage. However, these actions can feel inconvenient, especially when the consequences of ignoring them aren’t immediately visible. It’s hard to prioritize packing out your trash when you’re focused on your once-in-a-lifetime trip to Yosemite.

To overcome this, my strategy was to reframe Leave No Trace from a set of outdoor rules into a lifestyle movement—one that made sustainable recreation not just the right thing to do, but something people would feel proud, fashionable, and inspired to be part of. By repositioning these behaviors as a cool, desirable identity marker, I aimed to build cultural momentum around responsible outdoor ethics.

The first stage focused on developing a clear, foundational identity—starting with a deep understanding of our audience, defining a hyper-targeted niche, and refining the brand story. From there, I built out core building blocks like color palettes, typography, and brand voice, deliberately designed to support the next wave of creative needs: messaging, service structure, and motion design. To enable consistent, scalable content production, I also developed a set of flexible tools for generating branded messaging, animations, and other digital assets quickly and efficiently. These tools formed the backbone of a pipeline that allowed for creative output at scale.

In addition to my design responsibilities, I spent my years with Leave No Trace traveling the country full-time, engaging with the public about responsible recreation, and often introducing people to the idea of venturing into the outdoors for the very first time. Over that span, I spoke with more than 4,000 individuals, from passionate supporters to total newcomers. These conversations proved invaluable. Through direct, on-the-ground insight, I identified recurring patterns in attitudes, behaviors, and barriers to action that I used to define and segment our audience.

The Rugged Recreationist represented Leave No Trace’s traditional core audience—the experienced, backcountry recreator the brand was originally built around. But it was the Amateur Adventurer and Waterbottle Warrior where we saw the biggest opportunity for growth. The brand needed to evolve in a way that resonated with these newer, more casual audiences while still honoring the values of our legacy supporters. It wasn’t about replacing one group with another, it was about expanding the brand’s relevance without losing its roots.