Dancing Duma: a new mark, then everything the camp sells with

The challenge

Dancing Duma is a small camp on Mwaumatondo hill in Central Serengeti, rated 5.0 from 102 reviews on Tripadvisor. Its guests describe a luxury camp. Its logo described a souvenir shop: a detailed cheetah head with spots, shading and outlines, a decorative script underneath and a subtitle that had to fight both of them. It looked busy at full size, turned to mud on a favicon or an embroidered shirt, and told a tour operator "budget" before they had read a word.

The documents were the same story. The trade got a five-page US Letter contract in grey Word tables, with the old logo in the header and a heading that spelled CANCELLLATION with three Ls. There was no sales deck to send after a trade fair and no brochure to put in an agent's hand. Everything an operator saw before they booked was less finished than the camp they were booking.

The approach

We started with the mark, because every document after it would repeat whatever we chose. The proposal argued against cleaning up the old cheetah and showed two replacements: a running duma drawn as a single flowing line, and a duma whose back becomes the peak of a tent. We recommended the second. It joins the name, the animal and the product in one gesture, and it is simple enough to embroider. Around it we set a palette of four colours (espresso, antique gold, savanna sand, ivory) and the line "Wild places. Higher standards."

The sales deck came next. It has 14 slides in the order an operator asks their questions: where the camp is, what a tent has in it, whether families fit, what dinner is like, what guests say, and then rates and how to book. Every amenity comes from the camp's own facilities list. Every review is quoted and dated. The only rates shown are rack rates, and trade rates are marked "on request".

The rate contract kept every number exactly as it was. All eight prices carried over unchanged. What changed was the structure: rates first, then children and operational terms, then reservations and payment, then terms and conditions, then a signature page an agent can fill in and send back.

The booklet took the most work. Before designing it we went through all 89 photographs the camp supplied, and only one was large enough to print across a full A4 page. We checked every claim against the camp's website and Tripadvisor, wrote down every place two sources disagreed, and sent those points to the client as questions. The client approved a type pairing (Gilda Display with Karla) and a design direction before we built any pages. Each of the 16 pages is a layered CMYK Photoshop master with live type, linked photographs and a shared footer, so the camp's next edit is a text change, not a rebuild.

The results

Dancing Duma now has one identity used the same way on everything a tour operator sees: the deck that follows up a trade-fair conversation, the contract the operator signs, and the booklet a guest takes home. The deck is supplied as PowerPoint and PDF. The contract is supplied as PowerPoint and PDF. The booklet is supplied as a PDF/X-4 print file with 3mm bleed and trim and bleed boxes set, imposed saddle-stitch spreads for the printer, an interactive screen PDF with working email, WhatsApp, website and Instagram links, a version sized for WhatsApp, and the 16 editable masters.

There are also things this round did not fix, and we would rather list them here than have the printer find them. Six of the 16 pages use photographs that print at 100 to 200 ppi, because the camp only had web exports. The photographers' originals will fix that. The logo is still a 1,080-pixel raster taken from a PowerPoint file. It sits in a pale box on the rate contract, and it needs to be redrawn as vector artwork before it goes on signage or embroidery. The uniforms, vehicles and stationery in the identity proposal are concept mockups, not photographs of finished items. And the review quotes and the 5.0 rating have to be checked word for word on Tripadvisor before each print run, because reviews change.