Sherwood School District
Goal
As part of a large expansion project, Sherwood School District needed new names, new mascots, and new logo systems for many of it's schools. They also needed new website for the district.
Services
Naming
Brand Strategy
Identity
Website
Brandbook
Our work with Sherwood School District spanned Murmur’s suite of expertise. We embarked on a creative journey to rename three schools, develop four new mascots, design four new school logos and build a custom website. To make this project a great success for all we included a wide range of stakeholders (staff, teachers, parents, and community members) early in the project to gather key insights.
What's in a Name?
Part of our strategic approach to naming is recognizing its subjectiveness. That’s why we worked closely with Sherwood stakeholders throughout the naming process to ensure final names felt authentic and met organizational goals. We devised a series of large workshops to get representatives from all the invested groups directly involved, and once potential names were reviewed, the top 5 for each school were shared widely. This allowed the community to vote on and voice their thoughts on the proposed names before announcing the final selections.
“Knowing school names are a point of pride for a community we stayed grounded in the history, values, and hopes of Sherwood’s biggest stakeholders. Together we identified meaningful symbols, stories, and places and kept them at the heart of the naming process.”
Angela Larisch
Strategy Director
A Band of Merry Logos
All of the strategy and identity work we did with Sherwood School District culminated in a beautifully designed brandbook for the district as well as individual brand guidelines for each school. These books will guide their communications and design for years to come.
“It’s thrilling to create meaning and connection that speak to a client’s character all within a single logo. We outlined Robin Hood’s classic cap (feather and all), by using elements that resonated with the district. The textbook represents a foundational education tool, and Mount Hood stands as the school’s regional landmark.”
Marc Girouard
Art Director
Logo Family Exploration
As we turned our attention to individual school logos, we explored various styles and levels of detail and used the district logo to guide the look and feel. We wanted all the marks to fit together as a logo family.
“Creating a branding system across Sherwood schools was incredibly rewarding. We were able to provide them with concrete tools to achieve a cohesive look and feel, even into the future. Developing brand new mascots was a real added bonus and was an absolute blast.”
Tory Cunningham
Senior Designer
Brandbook
All of the strategy and identity work we did with Sherwood School District culminated in a beautifully designed brandbook for the district as well as individual brand guidelines for each school. These books will guide their communications and design for years to come.
Building the Website
To best serve district-scale, we created a network of sites with multiple access levels that could all be managed intuitively from one backend. Setting up the site in this manner allowed the district and the individual schools to control their local site content and share global content across the network.
“Through extensive research, including surveying local users (e.g., teachers, parents, employees, and students), creating personas, journey mapping, and site audits, we were able to alleviate user pain points, improve functionality and the overall user experience.”
Dani Ramsby
Lead UI/UX Designer
