National Parks
From Acadia to Alaska
Catalog at a glance — 3553 patches across 225 themed collections. These counts are pulled live from the catalog every time this page renders.
Scout is the field guide to the real world: a travel companion app that turns a road trip, a national-park visit, or a history detour into a living collection. The promise is simple — go see the world, earn the patch, keep the journey. The core loop is three steps: discover a place worth the stop, navigate there with the in-app compass or a planned trip, and unlock a patch when you physically arrive. Each digital patch is rendered as an embroidered iron-on and presented full-screen the moment it is collected.
The defining rule is "earned, not bought": you collect a patch only by standing in the place. The unlock is polygon containment against a real boundary — you have to actually be inside the park, the city, the battlefield. There is no proximity radius to describe and no way to fake it from the couch.
The catalog spans thousands of real-world locations organized into hundreds of themed collections, which are in turn grouped into a small number of curated campaigns — National Parks, State Parks, Route 66, City Challenges, the 50 States, Civil War, Founding & Revolution, Native America, Wild West, Ghost Adventures, Roadside Attractions, National Forests, Sports, Zoos, Aquariums, Major Airports, US Cities, and long-form Road Trips. (Live totals are in the snapshot at the top of this page; the full structure is in the Campaign Index and Collection Index below.) Each patch carries a short editorial write-up, a chronological history, a location card with credited photography, a gallery of official and scouts' photos, and its own community board — the app is essentially a field guide to America, playable like a game.
Scout is free, and there is nothing paid inside it — no subscription, no premium tier, no in-app purchase of any kind. All revenue comes from physical embroidered goods sold through a separate storefront. Getting in takes one tap — Google, Apple, or a one-time 6-digit email code — and every entrance is find-or-create, so signing in with no account simply makes one. A fourth path, guest mode, is fully built server-side, but its "Continue as guest" button sits behind a flag that ships off: do not describe Scout as usable without an account unless that flag has been turned on. Where it is enabled, guest sessions are real backend identities, so camera-roll import, the store, and community posting all work before a user ever links an email. Do not promise that a guest's collection carries over when they sign up: some sign-up paths start a fresh account.
Automatic unlock is polygon containment, and only polygon containment. As the user moves, the app takes their GPS fix, cheaply pre-filters the catalog on-device, and asks the server one question: which of these boundaries actually contain this point? The server answers with a hard geometric containment test against real boundary polygons — OpenStreetMap footprints, buffered street corridors for linear features like Route 66 alignments, and official National Park Service protected-area boundaries.
This applies to every patch type, including cities and states, which carry real boundary polygons like everything else. That is what lets one location unlock a whole nest of patches at once: a photo taken at the Saint Louis Zoo is inside the zoo, inside Forest Park, inside Saint Louis, and inside Missouri — and earns all four. There is no name-matching or reverse-geocoding anywhere in the unlock path; reverse geocoding exists only to label a place in the UI, never to unlock it. A small fixed radius survives solely as a stopgap for the handful of patches that do not yet have a boundary drawn — a coverage gap being closed, not a design tier.
Two guards matter. A GPS fix coarser than about 75 metres of accuracy is stored so the interface always has a position, but is not trusted to unlock anything. And the app refuses to collect until the account's existing collection has loaded from the server, so a cold start in a state you already hold does not re-collect and re-celebrate it.
The compass is a map-first screen built on Scout's own self-hosted basemap. It draws the actual unlock boundary as a filled area with a dashed edge in the patch's campaign colour, with the patch art as the pin and a pulsing you-are-here marker, and keeps both in frame as the user moves — tightening the frame to you and the nearest edge of the area as you close in. The console at the bottom holds the patch art inside a real compass that turns with the phone: the patch's mark sits on the rim at its bearing and reads ON COURSE when you are facing it. A warmer-or-colder read, measured to the edge of the unlock area, steps through Cold, Warmer, Hot, Burning and Found it, with taps you can feel that quicken as you get nearer. The compass makes no sound, and it only taps while it is the screen you are looking at. Its button opens directions in Apple Maps or Google Maps, or views the patch once it is yours. The top bar names the state: TRACKING, then INSIDE THE AREA, then COLLECTED. Arrival is answered by real geometry — a point-in-polygon test against the boundary the map is already drawing — not by a distance threshold standing in for one, and crossing it fires the collect check immediately rather than waiting out the background batching window.
When a patch unlocks, a full-screen celebration takes over and escalates with the patch's rarity tier: a held breath with sparks pulled into the patch's silhouette, then a burst, a shockwave and a flash, with the embers taking the tier's colour (Common stays orange, Rare turns blue, Epic violet). Legendary goes further — the lights go out, the hold is longer, and the patch gets god-rays and a gold edge. Common carries a "BADGE UNLOCKED" kicker; Rare and above name their tier instead. The badge count then rolls up, and a Share button offers the reveal as a vertical video, a 9:16 image, or a link that plays it in any browser — the scout picks the app and posts it themselves; Scout posts nothing. Tapping skips the reveal, and the OS reduce-motion setting jumps straight to the final frame. The celebration sells nothing.
Because one location can unlock several nested patches at once, an arrival that earns several patches plays one full-screen celebration: the innermost patch (the place actually walked into) is revealed, and the others are listed under it as "Also unlocked", with the badge count rising by all of them. Separate arrivals are separate celebrations. Each patch still sends its own notification. Nothing is announced during the first-run flow: neither a celebration nor a notification fires while the tutorial owns the screen, and what was unlocked along the way is shown on the tutorial's own closing reveal — all of it on one screen, once — rather than piling up at home afterwards.
New users do not start from an empty map. Scout can read the user's camera roll, extract where each photo was taken, and retroactively unlock patches for places they have already been — each patch back-dated to the day of the photo, so a first collection retraces real travel. The import screen is a map of the United States with only the states you already hold lit: "Light up my map" asks for the camera roll (the whole library, one album, or chosen photos — nothing is read before that ask), and the map fills in while the library is being read: each find's photo flies to its pin, a new state lights with that photo, tallies of new patches, states out of 50 and rare finds tick up, and a notable find pops its patch art above the map. Skip at any point stops the sweep and keeps what it found. A score follows (patches found, states lit, cities, rare finds), then a claim list where each find can be kept or dropped before the patches are added. (Live since 1.1.114; through 1.1.113 this screen was the earlier "Retrace" flow — an invite card, a route drawing, a claim grid.) Imported patches fill the map and collections, but they are not "earned": they count toward no patch achievement and cannot finish a visit mission. Matching runs on-device and no pixels leave the phone: only coordinates and timestamps are sent, and only to ask which boundaries contain them. Photo matching deliberately uses looser tolerances than live tracking, because photo GPS drifts indoors and many boundaries are tight footprints.
One Trips screen sits on top of the loop and asks a single question, “What kind of trip?”, with three answers: Plan my day (a timed day of nearby patches you still need), Just drive (the patches up the road within a detour you choose) and Collect nearby (the rest of your nearest City Challenge, routed). Each opens a map with the stops' unlock areas drawn on it. Directions are handed to Apple Maps or Google Maps with Route in Maps; patches still collect themselves the ordinary way, by being inside them.
Every patch has its own community board, and a dedicated Community hub gathers a general feed and a search across every board and post. Scouts recommend places, post tips and stories, ask questions before a trip, and upvote what is useful. Authors who have actually collected the patch carry a "visited" badge, so first-hand advice is visible at a glance. Because the patches you earn in the app are the only ones you can order as real embroidered iron-ons, the trip always comes first and the keepsake follows.
Getting these words right matters — several of them look interchangeable and are not.
Content nests in exactly three levels: Campaign → Collection → Patch.
Campaigns are the app's top-level browse surface. A campaign with exactly one collection (Zoos, Aquariums, Major Airports) collapses the middle level entirely and renders its collection directly, so a one-node journey does not put an extra tap between the user and the patches.
@-mention picker. It is not shown on the public web profile. It starts out derived from the email local part (lowercased, accents folded, +tag and punctuation dropped) with collisions broken by a numeric or id-derived suffix, and a member can change it any time on Edit profile (3–20 lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens; some words reserved; a handle given up is free for anyone at once). It is not the profile URL slug, which is a separate value carrying its own hash suffix.Beyond name and artwork: a short editorial summary, a "why visit" pull quote, historical significance, an established date and historical period, a chronological list of key events, notable figures, a location photograph with photographer credit and licence, National Park Service data where applicable (designation, fees, hours, activities, topics), and a type-specific data block appropriate to what kind of place it is. Location imagery is credited — the credit tracks whichever image is currently showing, whether that is the location photo, official NPS imagery, or a scout's own uploaded photo.
anon-<animal>-<number> handle, re-derived from the real address if they later sign up, and cannot change it.guest_mode, which ships off, so it is not normally a fourth option (see Feature Status). Where the flag is on, a guest session is a real backend identity, so import, the store, and community posting work immediately; guest purchases migrate on sign-in. There are no standalone permission screens: the location and notification ask is the last step of the first-run tutorial, with the background-location disclosure on screen before either system dialog, neutral wording ("Continue"), and, if location is declined, a pointer to camera-roll import as the genuine alternative.scout:// deep link.The inventory above is the summary. Each page below is the full engineering documentation for one feature, rendered straight from the Scout repository at the moment you load it — what it does, how it works, its data model, its edge cases, and an explicit section on what it deliberately does not do. Where these pages and the summary above disagree, these pages are correct.
From Acadia to Alaska
Get your kicks across 8 states
The ridge line and the coast road
A collection to complete for each city!
The land the National Parks didn't get to
All fifty, one region at a time
Muffler men, giant food and the beautifully strange along the American highway
Fifty-four cities, coast to coast. Get inside the city limits to collect!
96 forests, one wild map
America’s most haunted houses, hotels, asylums and grounds
Every arena, ballpark and stadium in the big three
From Sumter to Appomattox
Where the country was argued into existence
Boomtowns, forts and last stands
Twelve thousand years, thirty-five places
Thirty-six American zoos
Twenty-one windows on the deep
Forty terminals, one very frequent flyer
Sixty-four lights you can walk up to
From drive-up cinder cones to the Aleutians
Dinosaur tracks, mammoth bones and petrified forests
Where America buried its history
The places everyone means to see someday
The four far corners of the lower 48
Must-see landmarks, culture, and high-desert sights across Albuquerque, New Mexico.
UFO watchtowers, alien highways, and the cryptid legends that put small towns on the map.
Haunted mansions, Civil War prison ruins, old cemeteries and river-bluff history in Alton, Illinois.
A curated collection of the best and most notable aquariums across the United States.
Discover the capital of the New South and civil rights history
Keep it weird in the Live Music Capital of the World
Harbor history, ballparks, and cultural landmarks across Baltimore, Maryland.
Giant roadside food sculptures and quirky food museums across America.
Civil rights landmarks and iron-and-steel history across Birmingham, Alabama.
America’s most-visited stretch of scenic road: 469 miles of Appalachian ridge line linking Shenandoah to the Great Smokies.
Walk through American history in the Cradle of Liberty
Architecture, waterfront and wings across Buffalo, New York.
Duck and mimetic architecture — the 1920s-50s boom of programmatic buildings shaped like what they sold.
Antebellum streets, harbor forts and live oaks across Charleston, South Carolina.
Iconic landmarks, museums, and attractions across Charlotte, North Carolina.
Lookout Mountain, the Tennessee River and the Choo Choo, across Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Explore the Windy City's architecture, art, and lakefront
Riverfront landmarks, historic markets and museums across Cincinnati, Ohio.
Must-see landmarks, museums and lakefront spots across Cleveland, Ohio.
Red rocks, America's Mountain, and Front Range icons across Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Statehouse history, arts districts, and Buckeye icons across Columbus, Ohio.
Gulf beaches, a WWII carrier and barrier islands across Corpus Christi, Texas.
JFK history, arts, gardens, and big-league landmarks across Dallas, Texas.
Explore the Mile High City's outdoor adventures and cultural attractions
Motown sound, auto-age innovation, and riverfront landmarks across Detroit, Michigan.
Franklin Mountains, Spanish missions, and border heritage across El Paso, Texas.
Sites one untrained person spent a lifetime building, usually alone.
Cowtown stockyards and a world-class museum district across Fort Worth, Texas.
Blaine, Washington. Madawaska, Maine. Key West, Florida. San Ysidro, California. The four corner towns of the lower 48.
Underground gardens, Central Valley parks, and historic landmarks across Fresno, California.
Two thousand miles down the spine of the country, following the Mississippi from the headwaters at Lake Itasca — narrow enough to walk across on stepping stones — through Minneapolis, past a pre-Columbian city larger than London was at the time, under the Gateway Arch, along Beale Street, and into New Orleans. Eleven stops, ten states of river.
Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills, the Gateway Arch, Chicago, Graceland, the Opry, New Orleans, the Alamo and the launch pads.
Beaches, craters and royal history across Honolulu, Hawaii.
Space exploration, the Museum District, and bayou parks across Houston, Texas.
Racing heritage, monuments, and museums across Indianapolis, Indiana.
Beaches, the St. Johns River, and coastal nature across Jacksonville, Florida.
WWI memorial, jazz and baseball heritage, fountains, and BBQ-town landmarks across Kansas City, Missouri.
Iconic landmarks, museums, and natural sights across Key West, Florida.
Experience the Entertainment Capital of the World
Waterfront icons, canals, and coastal culture across Long Beach, California.
Explore Greater Los Angeles, the entertainment capital, from Hollywood glamour and the city's founding plaza to its historic neighborhoods, art and beaches.
Derby racing, bourbon, baseball bats, and Ohio River landmarks across Louisville, Kentucky.
Every Major League Baseball ballpark, from Fenway's Green Monster to Oracle Park's McCovey Cove.
The forty airports that move America — one patch per terminal you actually pass through.
Blues, soul, civil-rights history, and the Mississippi River across Memphis, Tennessee.
Sonoran Desert peaks, ghost-town lore, and museums across Mesa, Arizona.
Experience the Magic City's beaches, art, and Cuban culture
Beer heritage, Harley history, and the Lake Michigan lakefront across Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
City of Lakes art, riverfront milling history, and Mississippi falls across Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The fiberglass giants of International Fiberglass — fewer than 200 still standing.
All 30 NBA arenas, from the Garden's rafters to the Intuit Dome's Wall.
Visit all 30 NFL stadiums across the country
National seashores, preserves, wild rivers, lakeshores, and other natural features managed by the National Park Service.
Experience Music City's country music heritage and vibrant scene
Four hundred and forty-four miles from Natchez to Nashville along a route worn first by animals, then by the Natchez and Chickasaw, then by boatmen walking home upriver after selling their flatboats for lumber. No commercial traffic, no billboards, and no traffic lights on any of it. Eleven stops from an eight-acre ceremonial mound to the columns of a burned mansion, by way of the house Elvis was born in.
Experience the Big Easy's jazz, food, and Creole culture
Explore the Big Apple and its iconic landmarks
New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Niagara: the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, the Freedom Trail and the falls.
Lake Merritt, redwood hills, and Bay-side culture across Oakland, California.
The National Memorial, Western heritage, and Bricktown across Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
A world-class zoo, the Old Market, and Missouri River landmarks across Omaha, Nebraska.
Visit the Theme Park Capital of the World
US-1 from Miami to Key West, hopping the Florida Keys one bridge at a time on the bones of Henry Flagler's Overseas Railroad — an undertaking called impossible until it opened in 1912, and destroyed by a single hurricane in 1935. Eleven stops from the Art Deco District to the last buoy on the continent, by way of the first undersea park in the country and the only place on earth the Key deer lives.
California State Route 1 — the cliff-edge drive from the redwoods north of San Francisco to the beaches of San Diego.
Discover the birthplace of American democracy
Explore the Valley of the Sun's desert beauty and Southwestern culture
Inclines, rivers and museums across Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Discover the quirky city with books, roses, and waterfalls
The genuinely inexplicable: places whose only reason to exist is that someone did it.
Commissioned civic sculpture — the monuments towns paid for and became known for.
Gold Rush history, the railroad, and the state capital across Sacramento, California.
Witch trial sites, maritime history and old New England in Salem, Massachusetts.
Pioneer history, mountain canyons and the lake itself, across Salt Lake City, Utah.
Experience the Alamo City's rich history and River Walk culture
Experience America's Finest City with beaches and world-class attractions
Discover the City by the Bay with iconic bridges and hills
Silicon Valley tech, cultural districts, and quirky landmarks across San Jose, California.
Explore the charm of Georgia's historic coastal gem
Explore the Emerald City with coffee culture and stunning views
Lincoln's hometown, the Illinois capitol and Route 66, across Springfield, Illinois.
Explore the Gateway City
Theme-park thrills, cigar-city history, and the Riverwalk across Tampa, Florida.
The hundred miles between Austin and San Antonio taken at the pace the hills deserve: a swimming hole under a collapsed cavern roof, a river coming down limestone steps, a president's ranch, a German market town founded in 1846, a billion-year-old granite dome that creaks as it cools, and two dance halls older than most of the roads between them.
The National Mall and its memorials, Arlington, Gettysburg, and the homes of Washington and Jefferson.
The Golden Gate, Hollywood, Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Yellowstone, Yosemite and Pearl Harbor.
Sonoran Desert saguaros, Spanish missions, and sky islands across Tucson, Arizona.
Art Deco architecture, oil-fortune museums, and Route 66 across Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Oceanfront boardwalk, the 1607 First Landing, and coastal nature across Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Tour the monuments and museums of the nation's capital
A curated collection of the best and most notable zoos across the United States.
Beyond the app, Scout serves a set of public, unauthenticated web pages on scout-patches.com. The marketing site and the API share one origin; the shop is a separate storefront on its own subdomain.
/u/<slug>) — a scout's shareable page, opened from the Profile screen's Share button. Headline stats, a grid of collected patch art with an overflow count, completed-collection trophies, the member's profile photo if they set one, and a download-the-app call to action. It does not show the scout's handle: a member's page is named "Field Explorer". The slug is assigned once and never derived from the handle; the page is on by default with an opt-out in Settings, and guest and opted-out profiles return 404. No personal contact details and no precise personal coordinates./u/<slug>/card.png) — an auto-generated Open Graph image ("Field Explorer on Scout — N patches collected" for a member), so a shared profile unfurls into a rich preview./celebrate/<patchId>) — a patch's unlock reveal, playable in any browser; it is what the celebration's Copy link shares and what the share video is recorded from. One page and one video per patch, with nothing personal on them./national-parks, /national-parks/<park>) — a map of the national parks and one page per park: photo, history, key events, National Park Service hours and fees as a dated snapshot, and the park's patch drawn inside its real boundary. National parks only; reading one shows nothing about the reader's collection and unlocks nothing./api/avatar/<seed>.svg) — deterministic identicon-style avatars, so every scout has a distinct mark without uploading a photo./card) — the permanent destination encoded by a printed QR code; it counts scans and forwards to an admin-configurable target. QR images are served at /card/qr.svg and /card/qr.png./get) — one short link that detects the visitor's device and redirects to the right store listing, falling back to the shipped live listing when the admin config is empty. It is the link a share falls back to when the scout has no invite code yet; with one, "Invite a friend" shares the scout's own invite page./) — a single-screen hero: eyebrow, headline, lede, store badges, and hero art pairing a phone playing the unlock reveal with a macro of the real embroidered patch./app) — the download hub the QR code points at./discover/<patchId>) — a page built as the destination for a printed QR code: "Patch discovered — you're standing here right now." These links are QR-only and are not posted online. No physical patch carries a QR code; never describe the embroidered patches as scannable./brand) — a public but unlisted, noindex brand guide for marketing and contractors, with logo downloads./press) — descriptions, facts, screenshots, patch art and logos for anyone writing about Scout./terms, with /eula redirecting to it) — includes the objectionable-content and abusive-user terms expected of an app with user-generated content./privacy) — the policy referenced by both app stores. A separate policy for the Meta integration lives at /privacy-facebook./support) — the App Store support URL, also opened from in-app Settings and the FAQ./context) — a hidden, crawlable, server-rendered product brief, not linked from anywhere in the app or the marketing site.The app is free and contains nothing paid. There is no subscription, no premium tier, and no working in-app purchase. All revenue is physical goods, sold through a separate storefront.
This changes, and the honest answer today is narrow. The public shopfront is behind a coming-soon wall. The catalog, Store Exclusives, collections, the cart and the general hats category are all closed to the public — verified against production, where every walled path still serves the wall page titled "The shop is in the app". Two things remain open:
Do not write copy implying a browsable public patch catalog until the wall comes down.
Two separate mechanisms are often conflated:
Two honest caveats: the gate fails open, so a backend hiccup never wrongly bounces a real collector, and product pages are reachable by direct URL because the app deep-links straight into them — visibility filtering happens on listing surfaces. This is a purchase gate in the interface, not a cryptographic entitlement.
The storefront is Scout's own, running headless against Shopify: Shopify handles checkout and fulfilment, and the catalog is deliberately unpublished from Shopify's own storefront so there is exactly one place to buy. Checkout is served from its own subdomain.
A signed-in scout opens "Your Store" from inside the app and gets a shop built around what they have actually earned, not a generic catalog. It is not behind the coming-soon wall.
patchCount × $5, not the flat $8 a single patch costs. Adding member patches individually from the grid below never gets a discount, regardless of set completion or whether the bundle price has been applied.The app opens the shop in a full-screen web view from the drawer. Patch detail has two more entrances, a "Shop" tab and a "Purchase Patch" row in the patch menu, both behind the buy_patch flag — which is on in production and selling (true since 2026-10-15, re-checked 2026-10-29; it ships false by default and was briefly off on 2026-10-11), so an ordinary scout does see them. They open a page for that one patch inside the same web view, listing the patch and every product made for it; an earn-to-buy patch the scout has not collected shows "Earned, not bought" instead of products. The celebration screen sells nothing. None of these is an in-app purchase: every one of them opens this web view, and the checkout happens on the web. The session is handed over securely — tokens travel in the URL fragment so they never reach server logs, are re-verified against Scout's own signing keys, and are exchanged for secure cookies before the fragment is wiped from history. It fails open: a missing or invalid token simply means browsing signed out.
This section exists so that anyone — or any AI agent — working from this brief does not describe something Scout cannot do. Read it before writing marketing copy, ad scripts, App Store text, or product documentation. It is reconciled against the per-feature engineering docs in docs/features/, which are written from the code itself.
Reconciled against the App Store build 1.1.107 (released 2026-10-13). Polygon-containment unlock · the compass · one celebration per arrival, with "Also unlocked" · sharing the unlock as a video, image or link · camera-roll retrace · the one-screen Home · the discovery map · Near Me · the patch browser · patch detail · My Patches · patch rarity · collections, campaigns and The Ring · achievements · missions · Trips (Plan my day, Just drive, Collect nearby, Route in Maps, the Trip Calendar) and Navigate in Scout to a single patch · the local Album · posting a visit photo to a place's board · community boards and the community hub · the leaderboard · favorites · reporting, blocking and moderation · messages · referrals and invites · the 50 States and National Parks field records · the public profile and link card · the in-app store handoff. Feature flags still decide what people see; the ones this list leans on (trips_v2, my_patches_screen, new_home_screen, new_campaign_screen) read on in production — re-check before leaning on one. Google Play can be on a different version from the App Store.
Nothing at the moment. Shipped since this list was first written and now live: the "Light up the map" camera-roll import (1.1.114; described under "Starting with a head start"), a community board for every campaign, and the invite code carried on every share with Android pre-filling a friend's code (both 1.1.108).
Describing any of these as a live feature would be wrong.
cloud_album master switch is on in production, but that switch only opens the door: an account also needs an explicit per-account grant before a single photo is uploaded, and no grant has been handed out. The effective state is that nobody's photos leave their phone. Never describe Scout as backing photos up, and never write copy that depends on it, unless someone confirms the grants have started.guest_mode, which ships off. Guest sessions work; whether the button is visible depends on a live flag value.@-mentions resolve against (the public web profile does not show it). It starts out derived from the email address, so a default handle can reveal part of it. A member can change it any time on Edit profile; guests cannot. A handle given up is free for anyone at once, so never promise a scout their name is reserved. Say "handle", not "username".patchCount × $5 on 2026-09-02 (197 products, 0 failures). "$5 a patch" is now a true claim and may be advertised, as are "earned, not bought" and "unlock the whole set once you've collected it". Two exclusions remain by decision, not oversight: the fourteen store-exclusive packs are still a flat $8 regardless of size, and the fourteen packs aside, every sellable collection is now priced by size.Scout runs an admin application for content authoring, publishing, moderation, analytics, and store operations, plus an offline geospatial pipeline that produces the boundary polygons. Neither is a user-facing feature and neither should appear in any public description of the product.
Scout uses a single fixed dark theme called the "field-guide" palette — there is no light mode and no user-selectable theme. The aesthetic is deliberately earthy, analog, and tactile: a dark near-black canvas evoking aged paper or leather, brass/gold as the primary accent, and serif headlines in Fraunces paired with tight sans-serif utility text in Inter Tight. The visual language draws from vintage field guides, cartographic instruments, and expedition gear — compasses, embossed brass hardware, worn canvas.
The logo is the Field Rose: a brass compass rose on field-guide black, generated from code so the icon and wordmark cannot drift apart. Its palette is taken directly from the app's own tokens, and the wordmark sets Fraunces SemiBold with deliberately opened-up letter-spacing.
Key tokens from mobile/src/theme/:
canvas #0D0B09 (deepest, near-black with a warm cast) · base #14110D (screen background) · raised #1C1813 (cards) · elevated #251F18 (modals and sheets) · silhouette #0A0805 (the locked patch silhouette).primary #F7EEDD (warm off-white, like aged paper) · secondary #C9BDA6 · tertiary #8A7F6C · quaternary #5C5446 · onAccent #2A1A05 (ink on brass).primary #E8B86A (pins, CTAs, the compass needle, active states) · high #F4CC7E · soft #B89255 · deep #6B4F24, plus a glow and a border tint derived from the same brass.locked / ember #D6663A · collected / moss #6E8C5A · uncollected also #D6663A — a deliberate alias kept under its own name, because "locked" means a collection you have not bought and "uncollected" means a patch you have not earned. Plus destructive, info, and warning states.subtle rgba(255,220,160,0.06) and strong rgba(255,220,160,0.10). Strokes drawn over photography use white instead, since only white survives every exposure.#E8B86A, collected pin #6E8C5A, uncollected pin #D6663A.Fraunces SemiBold (patch names, screen titles, hero numbers), quotes in Fraunces Regular Italic, body and utility text in Inter Tight at Regular / Medium / SemiBold / Bold. The signature is tight negative letter-spacing on the Fraunces display sizes and very wide positive letter-spacing on the uppercase Inter Tight eyebrow labels.#F4CC7E → #E8B86A → #C89446 with a gloss highlight and dark-brown text.Scout's voice is that of a knowledgeable companion who has actually been to these places — unhurried, specific, and quietly proud of the work that went into the catalog. It is adventurous but not hypey; the reward is the place itself and the history behind it, not a dopamine streak. The app treats the user as someone who appreciates well-sourced detail, not someone who needs to be sold to. "Earned, not bought" describes the emotional register: you collect a patch by showing up, and showing up is the point.
Confirmed live copy on the scout-patches.com home page:
Other confirmed brand lines:
In-app copy examples:
Phrases that fit the Scout voice: "places worth the detour," "collect what you've seen," "the patch is proof you were there," "plan the route, earn the patch," "the catalog of everywhere," "history at the ground level."
Hard rules about the unlock mechanic. Say "the patch unlocks when you step inside the real boundary of the place" or "you have to actually be inside the park." Never use radius language — no "within 100m", no "within X feet", no "get close to", no "near it". There is no radius.
Phrases to avoid: "AI-powered," "gamified," "seamless," "robust," "ecosystem," "synergy," generic app-store boilerplate ("This app will change the way you travel"), and any language that makes it sound like a social network or a points race. Scout is not about competing with others or chasing streaks — it is about going to places. Avoid exclamation spam; let the mechanic do the bragging.
An ideal Scout ad follows this arc: a person sets out — car packed, map open, somewhere specific in mind, maybe a trailhead sign or a Civil War marker on a two-lane road. They arrive at the exact location: standing there, looking at the real thing. The compass reads that they are inside, the unlock celebration fires on their phone, and the patch artwork blooms into colour. The feeling is quiet pride, not triumph: proof I was there. A 15–60 second video built around setting out, arriving, and unlocking tells the whole Scout story without a word of explanation.