Sherwood School District

As part of a large expansion project, Sherwood School District needed new school names, new mascots, and new logos.
Get in Touch

sherwood schools logo collateral

The Sherwood School District’s mission is to provide a diverse community of learning that supports every student in achieving their fullest potential.

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.

Sherwood District Building Signage Mockup

Strategy: 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.

Angela Espersen

Angela Larisch

Strategy Director

“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.”

Sherwood school district logo suite in maroon

Branding: A Band of Merry Logos

Sherwood’s rebrand began with a logo redesign for the district. Our aim was to incorporate academic elements, northwest imagery, and potentially include some nod to the famous Sherwood Forest and the legendary Robin Hood. The chosen design successfully incorporated all three elements. Our use of a book, Mount Hood, and the strategic placement of a feather created the profile of an archer’s cap, the classic insignia of Sherwood’s heroic outlaw. 

Marc Girouard

Marc Girouard

Senior Designer

“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.”

Sherwood School Logos Process Sketches

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.

Ridges elementary school logo suite featuring the wolf mascot and type options
Hawks view elementary school logo suite with various type options as well as the hawk mascot
Sherwood Middle school logo suite featuring a bow and arrows as well as type options
Sherwood high school logo suite featuring type options and the robin hood mascot
Tory Cunningham

Tory Cunningham

Senior Designer

“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.”


Branding that always
hits the mark.

Get in Touch

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.

Tijani Stewart

Tijani Stewart

Senior Designer

“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.”

Sherwood Brandbook Spread featuring the logos of the school district

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.

 

Your branding journey
starts here.

Get in Touch