When Belmont’s new brand and values were ready to launch, we wanted to make the experience special. One of the ways we did this was through participatory design. Participatory design is about inviting the community into the design – in this instance – of the new brand.
One of our initiatives was to place some of the launch photography directly into the students’ hands. We gave them disposable cameras, and spoke to them about the school’s incoming new values. The brief to the students was to capture moments where they saw the values in action – whatever that looked like for them.
Then we built those photos back into the brand. We made a landing page too, with a QR code, where families could add their own stories of the values in action, so the gathering didn’t stop with the students.
What we ended up with was a community seeing its own experience reflected back, rather than us telling it what its values looked like. That’s the difference between announcing a value and helping a school recognise one it already lives.
Students' own photographs were built into the brand identity.
A QR landing page invited families to keep adding their own stories of the values in action.
We rewrote CEN’s entire services canon and re-architected their website from the school’s point of view, without rebuilding it, turning eleven ungrouped services into five clear categories and the generic pages into role-based guides.
Namoi Valley couldn’t justify a website rebuild, so in a single day I re-skinned the existing site, new photography and tidied messaging, into line with the brand.
