One of my favorite parts of running Twin Ponds is something most people never think about. I make our graphics. All of them. The website, the Facebook posts, the event posters, the emails, the bar menus, the signs around the pool telling you not to drown. I pick every font, every color, every layout. I built the logo and the brand. I even kern my own type, which, if you don't know what that means, is adjusting the space between individual letters so a word sits right on the page, and if you do know what that means, you already know I'm a little obsessive.
It takes a lot of time, and I carve that time out on purpose, because I think it matters. Every poster and every post has a practical job, getting information to our campers. When is Bears weekend, what's on the menu, what's happening Saturday night. But I want every piece to do one more thing: feel like Twin Ponds. Whether you're scrolling past it on your phone in January or standing at the bar in July, I want it to tell you something about this place before you've even read the words.
This goes back aways. In the 1980s I went to a technical high school, and for four years my focus was graphic design and printing. This was before digital was a thing, before anyone had a Mac on their desk, everything was done by hand. We learned the whole process from start to finish, from the first rough concept to thumbnail sketches (yes, we sketched thumbnails, with a pencil) to mock-ups, to camera-ready art, to running it on the press and holding the finished piece in your hands with ink still on your fingers. We studied the principles of design, color theory, art and art history, visual communication, how to build a brand from nothing. And we studied fonts, which I fell in love with then and have never fallen out of love with. When I needed to kern a headline back then, I grabbed a literal X-Acto knife, sliced the letters apart, nudged them into place with a steady hand, and held them there with melted wax. It was tedious and I loved every minute of it.
After high school I went into visual merchandising, dressing windows and building displays, figuring out how to make someone stop walking and look. That turned into a long career in retail management with a heavy focus on merchandising and branding, which is really just graphic design you can walk through. The whole time, I was dabbling on the side in interior design and art, because I couldn't help it. Arranging a room, hanging a wall, choosing a paint color, it's all the same muscle, telling a story visually so someone feels something before they can even explain why.
That's what I'm doing every time I sit down to make a graphic for this place. I usually start with a stock photo and combine it with my own photos from the campground, the ponds, the fire pit, the lodge, the pieces that make this place what it is, and build something that I hope grabs your attention and tells you a story. I buy the stock images from sites like Shutterstock. Most are regular photos of regular people, shot by photographers who make their living selling images, and these days some of them are AI generated. The design, the choices, the arrangement, the type, that's me.
I lean on stock for a simple reason. I can buy a stock photo for three to seven dollars. Or I could hire a photographer, find models, block off a full day, figure out lighting and staging, and pay everyone for their time, all to get one image of two guys laughing by a campfire for a Tuesday Facebook post. That's not realistic for us, and it's not realistic for pretty much any campground I know. And no, we don't walk around the campground on a busy Saturday asking guests if we can snap their picture. It feels invasive to me, putting people on the spot like that. Maybe some folks would love to end up in our marketing, but most people, I think, just want to enjoy the moment while they're here, and privacy is a big part of why people feel comfortable here in the first place. I don't think most of our members want their faces on a Facebook ad or a poster in the bar, and I wouldn't ask them to. A stock image comes with usage rights and full model releases, so I can use it over and over without asking anyone for anything.
Where technology does earn its keep for me is behind the scenes. I use AI to help edit my writing, because I am a terrible speller and I have long since forgotten what a dangling participle is (it helped me clean up this post). I use it to organize my workflow, keep track of my calendar, and build out processes so things don't fall through the cracks during the busy season. Every hour it saves me on the boring stuff is an hour I get to spend on the part I love. It's a tool, the same way the computer was a tool when it replaced my X-Acto knife and hot wax. Technology moves on, and we either move with it or spend a lot of time cutting letters apart by hand.
Plenty of campgrounds use AI to make their graphics, their posters, their website images, and I don't blame them one bit. Campgrounds run on tight budgets and small teams, and their time and money go where they should go, into running the place, keeping the water on and the grass cut, making sure the events happen and the campers have a great weekend. No AI bot ever came in at night and mopped the floors or scrubbed the toilets. Every campground has a team with its own strengths, you work with what you've got, and there's never enough time for all of it.
Roberto and I happen to have a pretty specific mix. Roberto's background is in hospitality and high-end retail with a real focus on client relationships, and he's also worked in project management and as an executive assistant, which is exactly why he's such a force when it comes to getting projects off the ground and actually finished. My background is why i get to create the brand and to make our graphics, and I make a lot of them.
So the next time you see a poster by the bar or an event post in your feed, know there's a person on the other end who fussed over the spacing between those letters for longer than he'd like to admit. It's one of my favorite parts of this job, getting to tell the story of this place a little bit at a time, one poster at a time. And the best part of that story is always the same, a place where people can come and feel at home.
