Bear Valley is a major resort in the Sierra Nevada in California. It's been around for a very long time, but never established any sort of long-term brand identity or equity during that time. It was due for a brand overhaul, and core to that rebrand was a new digital presence. The site was built in Drupal 7 and is designed not only for customer experience, but for staff use as well.
The website uses user accounts and roles for resort staff to access and administrate their content of interest. In this example, the first shot is the mobile version of the lifts and trails listing, as it appears to customers who want to check what's currently running while they're on the go. The second is the same page as it appears while logged into an account with access to the patrol range of adminsitrative roles. This adds the ability to change and update the lifts and trails statuses directly on the page itself from anywhere, on their phone, rather than through some separate back end interface.
Integrating the resort staff into the website like this was a forefront consideration for the new website. Updating the trails, weather, accomodations and so fourth are all done in-page by people with accounts that serve them only what they need to fulfill their responsibilities. This keeps procedures streamlined and straight forward.
Bear Valley was overdue for a new look to go with its new online presence. I designed this logo over the course of eight drafts and iterations, in time for the launch date. We wanted a brand that was cleaner and more encompassing, without nailing the resort down to an overly narrow perception with our customers on who it would be best suited for.
A big hurdle in particular was the use of the bear itself. The old logo, and a number of the first drafts, were of a bear's face. This opened the door to a number of conflicting personifications of the bear to different people upon seeing the logo, and this was proving to be an inconsistent and unreliable vector I needed to iron out. The solution, as shown here, was to take a different approach where the bear is represented by a full body shilouette instead of a face.
Overall, the site and brand was developed in 28 days, during the month of October. It wasn't comissioned until autumn to overhaul the resort's properties and had to be ready in time for ski season. To meet this demand, I developed a lot of overlapping, coordinated development methods.