If you walk into the Foundry on a weekday and spot a guy facing a brick wall with headphones on and a notepad covered in chicken scratch, there’s a good chance it’s Cam Hagreen.

Before he opens Illustrator or checks his email, Cam’s routine is simple: sit down, put on a favourite song, sip his coffee, and start creating. One notepad per client. Every meeting, every idea, every tweak goes on paper first. In a world of Asana boards, Slack threads, and Google Drive chaos, he’s running Barking Frog Creative a little differently, and it’s working.

“I’m pretty old school,” he admits. “I’d rather pick up the phone and talk it out than spend a week firing emails back and forth.” That “just call me” approach, paired with thoughtful work and a quietly stacked portfolio, has earned him a roster that ranges from semi-pro baseball teams to legendary Canadian bands to national retail brands.

From “Terrible at School” to First Jersey Design

Cam will be the first to tell you he hated school. He couldn’t sit still, couldn’t focus, and in his words, was terrible in every class, including art. There was no neat “I always knew I’d be a designer” origin story.

What he did have was a good eye.

When he was 13, his hockey team was headed to Denmark and Norway to play, and his dad (the coach) and the team manager (an accountant) were designing the jerseys. They were… not good.

“So I created our jersey,” Cam recalls. It had a sharp leaf logo and cleaner lines, way better than what grown-ups had come up with. That was his first real design: a fix to a very visible problem.

He didn’t head straight into design school after that. He worked in bars, lived with friends, drifted a bit, until his younger brother announced he was going to college. That lit something up. Cam enrolled in a design program, determined not to let his little brother graduate before he did.

Big Brands, Weird Jobs, and a Crash Course in “How Things Work”

Fresh out of school, Cam landed at Hoopla, a digital marketing agency. It was the early days of YouTube, and one of his first jobs was working on content with Ed the Sock, including figuring out how to censor old wet t-shirt contest footage so it could live on YouTube without getting flagged. Welcome to the industry.

From there, he worked on digital campaigns for Alliance Films (later absorbed by eOne), creating online ads for movie releases, then moved to Canadian Tire, cranking out in-store print materials. Those roles gave him a crash course in big-brand workflows: approvals, asset management, working with huge teams, and understanding how design decisions ripple through a whole organization.

Eventually, he hit a wall. “I knew I didn’t want to sit in an office forever,” he says. So he took a hard left turn.

Cam left the industry to help bring a family-invented game, Sportspateria, to life. He and a friend created everything, including a Kickstarter campaign, explainer videos, design, packaging, and manufacturing. The City of Toronto even gave them $5,000 through a young entrepreneurs program, and they sold out of their inventory. Once the run was complete, they decided not to scale it into a massive manufacturing business. It was a blip. A deep dive into product design, storytelling, and entrepreneurship, and then it was time to move on.

That’s when Barking Frog Creative was born.

Why “Barking Frog”?

Naming the business wasn’t some mystical branding moment. A friend built a name generator that mashed up verbs and animals, and one of the combinations was Barking Frog. It stuck.

It wasn’t totally random, though. Cam kept waking up on camping trips and found it hilarious to find frogs or toads under his friend’s tent. The kind of small, weird detail that makes a name feel like it belongs to you.

Today, Barking Frog offers creative direction, art direction, and graphic design through a fractional design model.  It hits that sweet spot between hiring a full-time in-house designer and paying full agency rates.

“Barking Frog fills that niche between an agency and an in-house graphic designer,” he says. Clients get someone who knows their brand inside and out, can jump in on anything from campaign concepts to brand refreshes, and doesn’t disappear after the logo file is delivered.

Baseball, Bands, and Brands: A Very Cam Client List

If you scroll through Barking Frog’s portfolio, you start to see Cam’s sweet spot: sports and music, plus a mix of scrappy businesses and established brands.

One of his flagship projects is the Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball Club, a semi-pro team whose history stretches back to 1895. Under new ownership, they needed everything. A brand refresh, new uniforms, merchandise, templates, and only a few months to pull it off. Cam simplified the colour palette, leaned into the club’s history, created four uniforms (including a Canada Day special), membership cards, merch, and fan-engagement assets in time for opening day.

That work led to something even bigger: the branding for a new Women’s Professional Baseball League. Cam created the league identity and is now building out team brands and uniforms for the inaugural teams in New York, Boston, LA, and San Francisco. He describes it as the first women’s professional baseball league since 1954, and feels honoured helping them make their mark in a new world where they deserve recognition for their training, hardwork, and epic skill.  A project sitting right at the intersection of sports, storytelling, and social change.

He’s also the quiet hand behind album art and layouts for bands like Cowboy Junkies, and has designed websites, covers, and visuals for musicians including Tom Wilson, Stephen Fearing, and Michael Boguski from Blue Rodeo.

Then there are clients like Massage Addict, Burns Landscape & Design, Oakwood BIA, and Redback Boots. His work travels well between neighbourhood main streets, indie artists, and national players alike.

The Pandemic Pivot (And the Marijuana Farm)

When the pandemic hit, Cam’s perspective shifted. He wrapped up a design contract and realized he was tired of saying yes to every project just because it paid the bills. “I was busy, but I was bored,” he reflects.

So he moved up to work on his family’s marijuana farm in Meaford, scaled back to just two clients he genuinely enjoyed, and gave himself space to reset creatively. He weeded (literally) out the work that wasn’t lighting him up and held onto only the kind of work he wanted more of.

When he was ready to ramp back up, he did it the same way he designs: deliberately. He reached out to old clients, family, and friends, and rebuilt a roster that aligned with his values. This included people he liked, brands he believed in, and projects where he could actually have fun.

Old-School Habits in a Hyper-Online World

Cam’s process is delightfully analog.

He writes every meeting down by hand.
He prefers phone calls over Slack threads.
And he has a strict rule: never send a new design at the end of the day.

“I’ll always have it done the night before a presentation,” he says. “But I need to look at it again in the morning with fresh eyes.” Once, he opened an album layout the morning of a client meeting and ended up changing the colour temperature just slightly. A tweak he was very glad he made before hitting send.

Like every creative, he hits walls. The “holy shit, I don’t know what to do with this” moments. His response is to step away: go read, exercise, reset. Being part of a coworking community helps too. A quick “hey, how’s it going?” in the kitchen is often enough to break the creative spiral.

Why Before Wow

If there’s one piece of advice Cam gives other designers or freelancers, it’s this:

“Every project has to have a why.”

He’s clear that design isn’t art. Art can be subjective. Design, he argues, is about whether something communicates effectively or not. Every colour, line, and layout choice needs a reason. Even if that reason is intuitive at first and articulated later.

That “why” applies to career decisions too. Why are you doing this project? Why do you want this type of client? Why are you saying yes to this and no to that?

Because burnout is real. The risks of freelancing are real. And if your only “why” is “because I should,” it’s going to get heavy fast.

Cam’s own why is simple:

“My life mantra is just create.”

Whether he’s designing a pro baseball uniform, making stickers out of ridiculous one-liners his partner drops, pressure-washing for the pure satisfaction of it, or building custom “tinker boxes” for friends' birthdays, he just keeps making things.

“Whenever I get frustrated I remind myself,  people pay me for this,” he says. “I get to look at colours and shapes all day. I live kindergarten every day. That’s fucking awesome.”

And honestly? That might be the most Barking Frog sentence of all.