Rain City Rock Camp
Brand Identity + Campaigns + Fundraising
Project Type
Role
Designer + Teaching Artist + Adult Rock Camp Director
Rain City Rock Camp is a music organization centered on building confidence, creativity, and community for girls, women, trans, and gender-expansive people. I designed the original logo in 2010, then continued shaping the visual identity across fundraising campaigns, events, merchandise, signage, motion graphics, and annual themes over many years.
My connection to Rock Camp extended beyond design. I also worked as a teaching artist and band coach and directed Adult Rock Camp, giving me a close view of the community the brand needed to represent. The resulting visual system is bold, flexible, and joyful enough to move from a donation appeal or T-shirt to a stage full of brand-new rock stars.
The Logo
The original Rain City Rock Camp logo brings Seattle rain and rock music together in one compact mark: an umbrella with a guitar for a handle. I designed it as a bold, one-color symbol that could hold up across T-shirts, buttons, banners, signage, and stage backdrops. Its simplicity made it instantly recognizable and easy to carry from camp and fundraising events into the wider music community.
Life Beyond Camp
One of my favorite logo sightings came in 2015, when Courtney Barnett wore a Rain City Rock Camp shirt onstage at Rock the Garden. Seeing it out in the wider music world was a thrill, and a lovely reminder that the identity had taken on a life beyond the organization.
Courtney Barnett at Rock the Garden 2015
Photo: Teddy Wolff for MPR via The Current
Watch the performance
Fundraising Campaigns
Rock Camp’s annual Fall Gala needed to feel like a celebration, not an obligation. I created event identities and carried them across invitations, schedules, ticket information, signage, and other guest-facing materials. Each year had its own visual language, but the work stayed bold, welcoming, and rooted in the confidence and collective spirit of camp.
Gala Poster Series
I created this series of oversized posters as atmosphere for the gala, not as fundraising pieces. Printed at roughly three by four feet, they were displayed on easels throughout the venue to bring Rock Camp’s energy into the room. Guests kept insisting they wanted to buy them, despite being told they weren’t for sale. The organizers eventually gave in and added the posters to the auction, where they sold for $300 to $500 each.
Key of Change
Key of Change was Rain City Rock Camp’s 2021 theme, built around one word doing a lot of work: key as music, access, unlocking, and transformation. I created a bright, flexible campaign identity with hand-drawn lettering, layered color, and shifting geometric forms that felt rhythmic, inclusive, and slightly unruly.
Broken letterforms and overlapping shapes suggest sound, movement, and old structures being shaken loose, while the saturated palette nods to vintage jazz and soul graphics. The system extended across animated social content, T-shirts, keychains, and presentation graphics for the fundraising gala.
What It Was All For
The work supported something bigger than branding: a long-running creative community built around confidence, collaboration, and making noise together.
