GORSE Farnley Logo Design
PART 1 - Case study with more photos on my website: https://www.craigthompson.design/works/gorselogo
"Aim: Improving and unifying the Teaching School brands for one of Britain's largest Multi-Academy Trusts."
The GORSE Academies Trust was launching 2 new teaching schools at their flagship academies (secondary schools). I had the task whilst working as Designer in-house for the Trust in 2017 of creating new logos for the existing GORSE SCITT teaching school (which had an entirely different mark/brand to the one we ended up with) and the 2 new ones.
Through listening and understanding everyone's concerns we were able to create logos for 3 new institutions whilst conveying the individuality of 3 existing ones and unifying them under a common design.
The idea which was easy for stakeholders to appreciate the value of was to use existing brand assets the Trust had created through Freckle (a local agency) and create a stronger connection to the GORSE brand and the individual schools.
We scrapped the old GORSE SCITT logo but kept the gradient and replaced the mark with the exact one from The GORSE Academies Trust's logo, Morley and Farnley logos as the basis for the new teaching school logos. For consistency I then created a gradient for the Farnley and Morley logos.
GORSE SCITT were attached to their logo and so were concerned about potential changes, carrying across their gradient helped sell them on the idea and carry through some of their old brand identity for consistency. Farnley Academy staff had already appropriated the colour purple and so their logo naturally became purple. The Morley Academy on the other hand weren't so keen on green and liked the idea of having all 4 colours from their academy in the teaching school logo. I got around this by showing them mock ups and explaining how the logo fit in with the others and also their building's cladding colours (green/yellow).
Overall the feedback was excellent and the transition to using the new logos seamless as we had based the brands so firmly on existing GORSE ideals and worked with what we had which helped speed up the turnaround and get everyone on board.
The logo is used in corporate stationery, business cards, events (table cloths), thermal flasks, pens, roller banners, posters, flyers, website, signage and more.