This project started with a story. A news story, to be exact. Scratching my head over what to take on for my senior project, I was scrolling through my local news feed one evening. That's when I saw it.
A local school district wasn't happy with their logo. I opened the article and read through it, and ideas started to form for how I could take on this project. A new logo, I thought. Designs for stationery, designs for apparel. A new color scheme; easily accessible, modern fonts.
Staring with sketches, like any self-respecting designer would, I started to try and figure out where I wanted to take this.
There are lots of ideas here - some decent, some terrible, some good. At this point, I was leaning towards the ones on the right, and so started working digitally to refine what I had into initial concepts.
The building in the logo sketches is based on the original schoolhouse the district started with in the early 1900s. Keeping that was a conscious decision to herald back to the history and roots of the district.
Some of these logos were starting to show promise, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with any of them, so I started experimenting with the idea of incorporating some more traditional emblem looks, as well as pushing the architectural acronym as much as I could.
I added the sun rays behind the building to call back to the fact that this is a school district in Arizona - and the AZ flag has sun rays on it.
After feedback, I eventually moved forward with the logo with the sun rays in it, and kept developing it.
The word "Toltec", set in a serif font, changed to one with tall small caps - Playfair Display. The words "School District" below it is set in Lato, a modern san-serif. Both typefaces are open-source free fonts.
The colors were tweaked to be a touch more vibrant, as well as be easier to distinguish from one another.
Stationery design
When designing the stationery, I wanted to use the brand colors, naturally, but I also wanted to incorporate the logo in a less typical way. After a while these graphical elements of the featuring the building and sun rays from the logo came about, and they're on the stationery for the district, from the business cards to the letterheads and envelopes.
Part of the project was to also design some posters for the district to use. Two of these posters highlight the schools participation in a program called "Kids at Hope". The other highlights the number of students and teachers in their district, while also outlining the district mission.
Website
The website was also part of the redesign - updated to be more modern as well as being slightly easier to navigate.
The new colors are used liberally in the design, to make the website more vibrant and navigable. The current website has many links and webpages hidden deep inside the website, where users have to dig around to find them - the website also features a navigation menu on the top and side of the page.
Part of the goal was to make those pages more easily accessible to the website users.
Adobe Illustrator was used to create the logo, Photoshop was used to create the item mockups, and XD was used to create the website mockup.
