I was referred to St Paul’s by Design Wales to help them renew their school crest. They wanted to retain a traditional-style crest but update it to something modern.
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Services: School crest, signage, Word templates and brand guidelines.
I joined a group of pupils who wanted to be involved and put together a workshop with them. The idea was that they would come up with the ideas of what their new school crest should represent and I would design it, giving them some sense of ownership over the new crest.
Armed with sticky notes, the kids wrote words that came to mind when they thought about their school, then we arranged the words into categories and we all agreed they covered everything.
We also talked about how we can represent these words in little icons and designing things means getting meaning across in a few colours. They loved their original colours so we knew were keeping those. And why not? Red, blue and yellow – perfect!
To go with their new crest and refind colours, I picked a freely available typeface called Sarabun that could be installed on all the computers. Sarabun is well equipped to be easy to distinguish and fit in with early learning, plus it had a range of diacritics so we could ensure every child’s name could be properly typed, no matter where they came from.
I also provided the school with a reduced version of the crest. Which could be reproduced at smaller sizes without any wording.
Going back to pupils having ownership over their school crest, I wanted the children to be able to make their own versions, based on what we talked about, and with coloured paper, pencils, and some scissors, pupils could envision their own crests and stick them on the wall.
Going to back to the shield shape, I wanted to make an easy to create signage system that could be used in and around the school.
I provided the school teachers an easy to follow set of brand guidelines with easy to follow instructions for keeping the new crest looking professional and they've really followed through. ‘A’ for effort!