Visual Design · Brand Design

Dehra Hiker

A brand that gets kids around Dehradun outdoors — kit, maps, merch, and food.

Dehra Hiker is a startup that hands children around the Dehradun region a hiking kit — a fun-fact book, maps, merchandise and food. I designed the brand it travels under.

Dehra Hiker — the finished product
Role
Graphic Designer, UX Designer, Researcher
Toolkit
Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate, InDesign, Asana
Team
Soumya Sharma
Duration
Dec 2019 – June 2020

01 The brief

Sell a child a day out, not a product.

The kit is four things in a bag. The brand had to hold all four together.

Dehra Hiker gives children around the Dehradun region a hiking kit: a fun-fact book about where they are standing, maps of the trails, merchandise, and food for the walk. Four very different objects, made by four very different suppliers, that a nine-year-old has to recognise as one thing.

I was the only designer on it, for seven months, and the brief was open in the way early-stage briefs usually are: there was no mark, no palette, no rule about what any of it should look like. So I started where I could get facts, with the valley itself.

  • Fun-fact book
  • Maps
  • Merchandise
  • Food

Dec 2019 – June 2020. Research, identity, packaging and the map series, in that order.

02 Research

I went and asked the people who have watched Dehradun change.

Before I drew anything I interviewed people who know the Doon valley better than any guidebook does.

A chairman of a Dehradun firm, a professional at GMVN who runs the tours organised by the government, a chief general manager at ONGC who is on a different Doon trail every week. I asked them about the city, the trails, the temples and the stories nobody tells any more, and I mapped what came back before I let myself think about a logo.

What I heard changed more than the styling. The fact book stopped being a souvenir and became the reason for the walk.

“You are looking at a land with a lot of history, Today, no body will believe these stories”

Mr. Manu Gaur · chairman, TaxAB Associatiat, DehraDun · research interview

Everything the valley is known for

the research mind map

DEHRADUN the word in the middle of the page

  1. M-01 The land
    • Green
    • Hill station
    • Cold climate
    • Himalayas
  2. M-02 The people
    • Peaceful
    • Young travelers
    • Jaunsari community
    • Small towns
    • Retirement place
  3. M-03 The institutions
    • State capital
    • Defence academy
    • Education hub
    • Forest research
  4. M-04 The history
    • Mythology
    • Garhwal
    • British colony
    • Clock tower
    • Art festival (Virasat)
  5. M-05 The way in
    • First stop
    • Connection to other exotic cities
    • Adventurous

Everything the valley is known for, on one page, before any of it became a brand. The original sheet hung all twenty-one of these around the word in the middle with no order at all; they are gathered here under what each one is about. Nothing has been added, and nothing dropped.

03 The mark

I drew the peaks until they stopped being a sticker.

A logo a child can copy onto the back of an exercise book is a logo that works.

explored Logo exploration page: a large outlined badge of two mountain peaks with a curving river and DEHRA HIKERS set around the circle, beside a grid of twelve colourway trials of the same badge in black, blues, greens, ochres and reds.
explored — the badge, and twelve ways of colouring it.
chosen Chosen logo page: a circular mark of layered peaks, a river and pine trees, locked up with the DEHRA HIKERS wordmark, shown in eight colourways from greens to teal-and-orange to terracotta.
chosen — the circle keeps the peaks, the river and the trees; the wordmark stops shouting.
The first badge is the one I liked; the second is the one that works. Outlined type wrapped around a circle needs size to stay readable, and almost nothing in this kit is big — a snack wrapper, a bottle neck, a bag pocket. The chosen mark is built from solid shapes instead, so it holds at a centimetre and a child can still copy it onto the back of an exercise book.

The greens the mark is built from

sampled from the chosen lockup

  • Hiker green

    the circle, and the light wordmark beside it

    #4D9B45

  • Deep pine

    the bold wordmark

    #184D23

  • Forest ink

    the near-black lockup

    #02261A

  • Leaf

    the light green in the two-tone version

    #9CCD4D

  • Moss

    the ground it sits on

    #5F9643

The same lockup also exists in teal and rust (#0097A8 / #DB5C29), ochre and yellow (#AB9530 / #DBD424), teal and brown (#02826B / #8B5121) and terracotta (#B06C59). Eight colourways, one drawing. The rule the rest of the kit runs on is already visible here, on a single sheet.

Both marks I kept hold the same three things: the peaks, the river between them, and the trees. Everything else was negotiable.

04 The kit

Then I put it on everything a nine-year-old actually touches.

One bag, packed three different ways, because three different people carry it.

The kit was never one product. A child on a school trip, the teacher walking behind them, and an adult who just wants a day on a trail need different things in the same bag — so the contents list was written per person before a single wrapper was designed.

The original research page called them school going kids, teacher and normal people, and set the three lists side by side on one sheet.

  1. K-01

    School groups

    Jacket in winter, t-shirt in summer, first aid, healthy food, a stick, a free bike, a tag and a map.

  2. K-02

    Teachers

    The importance of the place, a mini guide, and an award badge for the group's students.

  3. K-03

    Everyone else

    Jacket, t-shirt, first aid, a stick, a free bike, fun facts, a map, a tag, a knife, rope and a water bottle.

The bag it all travels in

A teal drawstring bag printed with a night mountain scene — snow peaks, a moon, a river, pines and leaves — with the Dehra Hikers roundel on a white pill and the words HIKING KIT in a pink pill beneath it.
The mark on a white pill, the words on a pink one, so both stay readable over the illustration.
A drawstring bag is the one thing in the kit that gets seen from a distance, on a moving child. The peaks pattern at the top and bottom is the logo's own drawing taken apart and repeated, so the bag is still branded even when the roundel is facing the other way.

The food, and the things that go in the bag

Three energy-drink bottles in magenta, yellow and orange, each printed with the Dehra Hikers mark and a pattern of the fruit it is made from.
Energy drinks — one illustrated fruit per flavour.
Five sunscreen tubes in pink, yellow, green, lilac and blush, each carrying the Dehra Hikers mark above a leaf pattern and the word SUNSCREEN in a rounded slab.
Sunscreen — the same leaf pattern, five ways.
Three fruit-and-oat bars in yellow, crimson and navy wrappers labelled mango, strawberry and blueberry, all carrying the Dehra Hikers mark.
Fruit bars — mango, strawberry, blueberry.
The rule I set myself: the mark never changes, the colour always does. Flavour, factor and trail are all told by colour, so nothing in the kit needs to be read to be sorted.

Three destinations, three maps

A folded map of Dehradun printed in forest green, with the district outline in cream, rivers in blue, trails in red and orange, and DEHRADUN set large across the top.
Dehradun
A folded map of Mussoorie printed in deep teal-blue, with the town outline in cream, trails picked out in red and green, and a repeating mountain pattern behind the type.
Mussoorie
A folded map of Rishikesh printed in yellow-green, with the Ganga drawn wide in blue, a line drawing of a temple gate at the lower right, and RISHIKESH set large across the top.
Rishikesh
Each map is drawn to the same grammar — cream landmass, blue water, a compass rose in the corner, a hand-drawn landmark — and separated only by its field colour, so a child can tell which day they are on from across a room.

The kit had to be legible to somebody who is nine, on a hill, in the wind. An interface asks nothing harder. It is the same problem.

Branding for children turned out to be a legibility problem wearing a costume.

Everything I did after this — product interfaces, design systems, accessibility work — comes back to what the bar wrapper taught me: if the meaning is carried by colour and shape rather than by words, it survives distance, motion, bad printing and a reader who is not paying attention.

The research behind it ran long enough to become a paper of its own, on hiking, the Doon valley, and designing for children who are outdoors.

The research paper is held with the project archive; it is not published on this site.

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