When Belmont’s new brand and values were ready to launch, we wanted to do more than announce them. A school can roll out a new set of values with posters and an assembly, and that works, but the values tend to land as something handed down from the top. We were after something closer to the opposite: the community bringing them to life.
So we did some participatory design. Rather than make the launch imagery ourselves, we put it in the students’ hands, giving the kids disposable cameras and a simple brief, go out into the school, and when you catch one of the new values in action, take a photo. 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.
