Trailside Field Guide

Trailside Field Guide started as a YouTube channel. Morgan walks Tennessee trails, films what she finds, and makes careful videos about it. The channel needed a home on the web, and a look that would feel the same on a thumbnail, a trail-side phone screen, and a Facebook feed. We built all of it: the identity, the website, and a post system that keeps the whole thing consistent.

It is also a good example of what one project can hold. Brand, web design, and social media came out of the same shared files, so nothing had to be translated from one to the next.

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The brand

The mark is a magnifying glass with a compass inside it: look closely, and know which way you are headed. Paired with a rounded, friendly wordmark, it reads clearly at a thumbnail size and still feels like it belongs outdoors. The kit also includes a leaf pattern drawn from a licensed vector set, avatars and covers sized for every platform Trailside uses, and a short guidelines doc so anyone who touches the brand does it the same way.

Fredoka carries the headings and Nunito carries everything else. Both are free and load fast, which matters on a trailhead with one bar of signal.

The website

Trailside launched with 24 mushroom pages and 25 wildflower pages. Every species has a real photo, a map of Tennessee, a season strip showing the months to look, a where-to-look list, and a credit line for the photographer. Every mushroom page opens with the same safety note, worded the same way each time, because that is the one sentence nobody should have to hunt for.

It is built to grow. More videos and more states will mean hundreds of pages over the next year, all from the same template. It is a static Astro site, so pages load quickly on a phone, there is no database to patch, and hosting stays inexpensive. Real photos only, no AI imagery, and every image is credited where it appears.

One script, a whole website

The site is built from the same script Morgan uses to make each video. It lists every species, the months it blooms or fruits, where in Tennessee it grows, what to look for, and what it gets confused with. We turn that file into pages, so a new video becomes new pages without anyone retyping a thing.

This is the part that scales. A content system that matches how the content is already made saves more time than any single page design.

The posts

Social posts follow the same system as the site. Each card has a rarity badge, an outlined title, the scientific name, and a photo credit. Twenty-five cards were made from the same template, so the feed looks like one thing from the first post to the last.

Built with the people who make the content

Morgan writes the scripts and films the trails. We build the system around that work. It is the arrangement we like best: the person who knows the subject keeps the subject, and the design and code are built to make her work easier to share. Watch the channel at @trailside.fieldguide.