Holbrook Travel specializes in educational and natural history travel — group tours and academic expeditions to the Amazon, Galápagos, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Africa for an audience of natural history enthusiasts, birders, educators, students, and scientists. As Creative Director and Marketing Coordinator, I led all visual and marketing output: the website through multiple redesign cycles, all print and digital marketing collateral, and the brand's visual identity as it evolved.

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Approach

The website went through three platform generations during my time at Holbrook. It started on SharePoint — dense, undifferentiated, with destination photography buried in small thumbnails and trip information in flat text blocks. The first redesign moved to WordPress, which opened up real layout control and let us build something that felt like an actual travel brand. The final iteration used a customized CMS framework, which gave us the flexibility to build exactly the browsing and trip discovery experience the content demanded. Each cycle was a meaningful step forward — by the last version, the homepage led with full-bleed wildlife and landscape photography organized into clear destination categories, with a visual system that let the photography do the selling.

The key design challenge was respecting the audience. Holbrook's travelers are not casual browsers — they're birders who will read a full itinerary, educators planning academic trips, scientists joining research expeditions. The design needed to feel immersive and visually compelling without dumbing down the content. That meant photography-forward layouts that still gave room for the detailed trip information this audience expected and relied on.

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Outcomes

• Led multiple website redesign cycles, progressively improving visual hierarchy, photography integration, and trip discovery
• Managed the visual brand as Holbrook's sole creative resource
• Oversaw the 40th anniversary rebrand and website launch

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Other work

As Marketing Coordinator, the website was one piece of a much broader role. I was responsible for all of Holbrook's marketing output — designing and producing everything from tri-fold brochures and destination guide books to event posters, postcards, partnership ads, conference booth experiences, and presentations. Each piece had to carry the same brand voice — educational, warm, credible — across very different formats and contexts.