The Task:
PSESD's Learning, Teaching, and Family Services (LTFS) department offers a variety of high quality professional development services prenatal to postsecondary, aimed at supporting educators, children and families. They provide customized professional development and technical assistance, peer- group networking and learning, cooperatives, consortia and direct service to schools in Pierce & King County. As one of the largest departments, they wanted a logo to unify and strengthen their brand.
This logo was a unique challenge, because it also needed to establish a logo treatment that could be applied to other PSESD departments.
This project won Best in Category for Branding/Image Packages, with a perfect score, at the 2021 Washington State Public Relations Association awards.
INITIAL RESEARCH:
How do we create logos that are aligned with our overall brand but ultimately distinct?
There was an identified need at the ESD to have more consistency with department logos and move away from programs & departments creating their own logos.
I knew it was critical that the LTFS logo followed a visual pattern that could be replicated with other ESD departments. To begin with, I created a logo tree to get an overall idea of what all of our different pre-existing logos look like, and figure out how we could move in a more unified direction.
Further Research:
The first step was to create a type treatment that combined the LTFS department name with the PSESD ambigram. This needed to be something that could be applied to other departments down the line, like business and human resources. This was the solution I came up with:
From there, we did a survey with the LTFS team to figure out their initial ideas and concepts for logo marks. When asked what attributes they wanted viewers to think of when they looked at the logo, what came up was "Visionary, Proactive, responsive (data driven), child/student centered, service orientated, collaborative, courageous".
They particularly wanted a logo to represent "gap closing practices" and "racially just humanizing systems".
LOGO IDEATIONS:
We had many different logo ideations. It was a particular challenge to find a logomark that was cohesive with the PSESD logo but also represented everything LTFS did - community, family, learning. Finding something visual to represent this message was the ultimate goal.
Final logo options:
FINAL BRANDING PACKAGE:
The final logo symbolizes community, gap closing practices, and diversity. It is aligned with the PSESD brand but also can stand on its own.
With the logo finalized, the last step was to flesh out the brand style guide.
Further logos:
The goal of creating a visual system for departments was also achieved with this project. Other department logos I’ve created following this system are below.
