A wilderness school website that feels welcoming, not extreme
CONCEPT · CUSTOM BUILD
We designed a brand and website for a fictional outdoor school that teaches beginners, families and groups how to look after themselves outdoors.
A concept project: a fictional business, designed and built in full to show our custom work.
INDUSTRY
Outdoor education
PROJECT
Concept build: Summit Survival (fictional)
SCOPE
Brand identity, website design, copy
PLATFORM
Squarespace 7.1
CUSTOM CODE
None needed
HOW IT STARTED
The brief
Summit Survival is a fictional wilderness skills school we created to show what a custom brand and website project looks like. Its guides teach shelter, fire, water, navigation and first aid to people with little or no experience.
The category leans hard on camouflage, survival grit and "extreme" energy, which puts off exactly the people Summit wants: new hikers, parents and group leaders. The site needed to feel welcoming and well-run, and to answer the safety question before anyone had to ask it.
Executive Leadership Through Wilderness Experience
We partnered on a mock brand and Squarespace website redesign for Summit Survival Leadership to clearly communicate the depth, safety, and leadership value of their wilderness-based executive programs led by Tobias and Ardene Flenderson.
Tobias and Ardene Flenderson take executives and their teams into the wilderness to build leadership that holds up under real pressure — persistence, clear thinking, trust, and adaptability, learned by doing rather than by slideshow. The experience was already powerful; the old website didn't carry its weight. In this mock project we rebuilt Summit's brand and Squarespace site so the depth, safety, and executive value of the work are clear before anyone books a call.
The Challenge
On the ground, Summit is careful, well-run, and safe — a serious field program led by two facilitators who have worked in both the boardroom and the backcountry.
Online, none of that came through. The old site chased spectacle: a "Primal Skills for Peak Performance" hero, program cards padded with invented "Projected ROI: 400%" claims, a "high-adrenaline" helicopter drop, and "survival" pushed ahead of the leadership outcome at every turn. Program names didn't even match from one page to the next.
To a corporate buyer weighing a real budget, it all read as risk — an adventure holiday, not leadership development.
- Fabricated ROI multipliers (250–400%) that undercut trust rather than building it
- Adrenaline-and-"primal" framing that made a safe, serious program look reckless
- "Survival" pushed ahead of the leadership outcomes executives actually buy
- Inconsistent program names across pages, and stray copy left in from another template
- No single, clear next step for a leader ready to plan a program
What we built
A complete brand and an eight-page website, built entirely with Squarespace's own tools.
A trailhead brand
Granite, lichen, snow and sign brown, with headings in National Park, a typeface drawn from routed wooden park signs.
Courses as trail signs
Each course is a board on a signpost, angled like the real thing, pointing to its own page.
Safety up front
A dedicated safety page and a safety section on the homepage: guide ratios, first aid, weather plans, all in plain language.
Pages for every kind of visitor
Course pages with day-by-day trail blazes, a families and groups page, and a gear list people can actually pack from.
The work
Home, desktop + mobile:
DESKTOP · HOME / MOBILE · HOMEThe trailhead signs + a course page with blazes:
TRAILHEAD SIGNS / COURSE PAGESafety page + gear list:
SAFETY / GEAR LISTRESULTS
What this build shows
A business that asks people to step outside their comfort zone has to earn trust before it earns a booking. Leading with welcome and safety, and making every course easy to compare, gives first-timers the confidence to sign up.
It also shows how much character Squarespace's own tools can carry. The trail signs, the blazes and the National Park typeface are all native, so the school can add courses and dates without touching any code.
What we changed
We led with strategy, not decoration, and reframed the whole job as risk → credibility: the wilderness stops being a liability and becomes the reason the leadership lessons stick. Then we built a grounded, outcome-led site where a corporate buyer can see the substance before they ever picture the setting.
- A grounded brand identity — a pine-and-ember palette, Spectral and Work Sans, and a first-light ridgeline motif that signals credibility over adrenaline.
- Outcome over spectacle — the invented ROI multipliers and "primal" framing stripped out; programs rebuilt around real leadership deliverables.
- Wilderness as proof, not risk — the backcountry repositioned as the reason the lessons hold, not a thrill to sell.
- One clear next step — a single, plain path to plan a program, on every page.
The Build
The redesign kept everything that made Summit credible and cleared away everything that got in the way — a six-page site where the brand carries the weight of the work without ever raising its voice. Four programs with honest prices and tangible takeaways, a documentary field gallery, and one simple path to book.
Before — a "Primal Skills for Peak Performance" hero, invented ROI claims, a high-adrenaline heli-drop, and survival pushed ahead of the outcome.
After — a grounded pine-and-ember system, a first-light ridgeline motif, outcome-led programs with real deliverables, and one clear path to book.
The outcome
As a sample project these are illustrative — and, fittingly for a rebuild about credibility, they measure composure rather than shout a multiplier. A focused, search-ready site. One clear booking path in place of a scattered set of calls to action. And a first impression that finally reads as grounded as the work feels, so the enquiries come from serious buyers.
*Illustrative sample outcomes for a mock project.
“Our old site made us look like a weekend adventure. This one makes it obvious that we build real leadership — safely, and for serious teams. It finally feels as grounded as the work.”
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