The Grant Academy – Case Study
The Grant Academy
The Grant Academy is a private school that specializes in the education of elementary age students with learning and cognitive disabilities, ADHD, ADD, Asperger’s autism, and other disabilities. The Grant Academy came to us to create and build a full branding and web experience that captured their unique approach to optimize learning for all types of students. The new visual design and brand must help them to stand out from other private S.T.E.M. schools into a league of their own, while communicating the benefits and affordability of their style of education and learning.
Branding – Logo – Identity – Website – Collateral
The Grant Academy believes all students can learn, but some learn differently. They use a whole brain approach to optimize learning. If students can feel it, touch it, hear it, and experience it, they can gain a better understanding and experience true learning.
The Vision
The vision for The Grant Academy’s new brand and web experience was to communicate the school’s effectiveness, professionalism, and confidence with their educators experience, ability and passion for teaching. We needed to ensure the digital brand has a strong, positive meaning for the school, and represents The Grant Academy’s extensive knowledge, experience and understanding when working with special needs students. The web experience honors their commitment to the students and parents with easy-to-navigate actions and reliable information that communicates their key goals to help their students achieve their academic and social goals.
The new visual design and brand is evocative, real, and clear, and the voice captures The Grant Academy’s devotion to the success of its students, collaborative spirit, and integrity.
Branding
We organized a brand strategy meeting with the client to understand their vision for the new Grant Academy brand. They had a general idea for the logo and brand image to incorporate the use of a crest or shield to symbolize their steadfast principles, commitment, loyalty to their students and process of teaching. We took this concept and expandeded it with use of abstract representations of people in the middle of the logo to embody their commitment to all students regardless of race, religion, or nationality. The stars are symbols of the goals and achievements students acquire at The Grant Academy, and the tagline represents their philosophy… “In the right environment, all students will achieve more success”.
Creating a unified brand and image to represent The Grant Academy was a little tricky. Care was given to ensure the visual identity scales clearly across their multiple branding initiatives.
To brand the new school identity multiple combinations of the logo and color palette were designed and applied to all the brand components. The design of the exterior signage is clean, bold, and professional to clearly mark the school. The Grant Academy is a private school and requires uniforms for their students. With different color combinations used for the uniforms the logo had to be refined while maintaining the original brand qualities. The color palette was carefully created and applied to the design of the school uniforms, signage, marketing materials and online web experience in a consistent manner.
My Role
As the Creative Lead, Designer and Information Architect I worked with the client to gather requirements and understand the overall vision, objectives and business needs for the new Grant Academy brand and online experience. I created the branding guidelines, website structure, content flow, page layouts and design by utilizing the latest interactive technologies including HTML5, CSS3 and WordPress Shortcodes to create a user-centered design focused on the key services offered by The Grant Academy. I ensured the online experience, all design collateral and marketing materials have a cohesive and consistent look and feel to represent The Grant Academy brand.
The overall experience of the website symbolizes The Grant Academy’s modern approach to special education. We implemented clear interactions with clean design elements, bold graphics and custom photography, which aligns with the quality of courses provided by The Grant Academy and their educators.
Collateral & Photography
The Grant Academy required visual identity collateral for their teachers and for general use within the school. The brand collateral needs to do be much more than just be pretty, it must communicate their services and create a positive message to the parents of potential students. The design must convey their message in a clear and distinguishable way across all collateral. The media used to support the message should have consistent color, style, and visual assets across all channels and further The Grant Academy’s mission. We also designed the school signage and a marketing brochure to clearly communicate The Grant Academy’s purpose and abilities as a Private Elementary S.T.E.M. School that can be trusted with their students education. The new brand image was also applied to cups and pens for use at the school.
We incorporated custom photography of the school classroom environment and building architecture, paired with stock photos for use in the website design and marketing collateral. The final results enhance The Grant Academy Brand message for aesthetic benefit and storytelling.
We successfully designed a complete ecosystem of brand visuals and online experience for The Grant Academy Brand with the creation of the brand, logo, website and collateral. The end result is a unified brand experience and web presence that is smart, approachable, and attractive to parents of potential students.
Project Overview
Creation of an all new modern Brand, Logo and Website for The Grant Academy. Including creation of all graphics and designs for the website.
Creative Strategy & Creative Consulting
- Understand your vision and requirements
- Create outline and workflow
- Brainstorm ideas and solutions
- Content review and updates
Info Architecture UI/UX Graphic & Web Design
- Overall web site information flow & structure
- Create sketches & wireframes
- Developed the branding guidelines, color palette, type treatments
- Designed the creative vision into a Brand and Identity Solution
- Design the creative vision into graphical screen designs and all graphical interface elements
Front-End Development & WordPress Solutions
- Develop the page layouts and design with HTML – CSS and WordPress Shortcodes
- Test on browsers and devices
- Client review, revisions, updates
- Launch website
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