The National Park Art Bus

Before Carly Kemp was designing social media campaigns for healthcare organizations and building visual systems for global nonprofits, she was doing something most designers never attempt: she built a bus, drove it across the United States, and painted the national parks.

Not photographed. Painted. On site. On canvas. On the side of the bus itself.

Carly converted a GMC shuttle bus into a mobile studio and living space, then set out on a cross-country journey through America’s national parks. At each stop, she set up her easel — sometimes on a canyon rim, sometimes at a trailhead overlook — and painted what she saw. Not postcards. Full canvases in oils and watercolors, with the kind of saturated color and loose energy that makes you look twice.

Along the way, she painted the bus too. The finished mural wraps the lower body in a geometric mountain range — purples, golds, pinks, and earth tones — turning the vehicle itself into a piece of the project. By the time it was parked under the sequoias, the bus had become as much a part of the landscape as the paintings inside it.

The project was featured on NBC 5.

So why does a national park art bus matter on a design agency’s website?

Because it tells you something about who’s working on your brand. Carly doesn’t just execute design briefs. She conceives entire projects from scratch, builds the infrastructure to make them happen, creates the visual work, documents it, and gets it in front of an audience. That’s the same muscle she brings to Partners in Design — whether it’s a year-long social media strategy for Cochran Ski Area, an infographic system for UVM Hillel that turned raw data into a story about 1,665 students and 224 events, or a visual identity for a global healthcare nonprofit.

The bus just happens to be the most fun proof of concept she’s ever built.