Sun Valley Academy and Preschool have always been outstanding for its students and families, but their brand didn’t reflect the stories and aspirations that drove them to provide such transformational education, and what makes them unique.
With a decade of success under their belt, they decided to expand their reach and influence in the surrounding English and Spanish-speaking communities. In order to motivate, inspire, and inform parents, support students, and celebrate their institutions' successes in a way that makes a human connection, they wanted to take full advantage of the power of their brand, story, and digital presence.
By providing clarity of mission and insight into the institution's academic vision and goals, SVA’s branding and marketing tools deliver insight into the charter's educational purpose.
SVA believes in focusing on the whole child-body, mind, and spirit-as a leader-in-me school. As our branding proclaims, SVA is truly about focusing on Every Student. Every Day. Through more expressive and bespoke visuals, their holistic 'Learn, Love, Lead' approach to child education becomes tangible, illustrating all the small but significant moments that contribute to change within education and within the communities it serves. Having a multilingual brand experience that extends from the website, to its social channels, to the physical door-to-door marketing tools, and programs, they can instill confidence in parents of all backgrounds and help them lead their children to brighter futures and more opportunity.
Uncovering what's at heart
Our team set off to define what attributes would drive the rebrand and quickly uncover what was at the heart of an SVA education. After a few collaborative sessions, and a thorough review of their existing materials and systems, we worked remotely with stakeholders within Sun Valley Academy to create an emphatic brand identity. Our team led SVA through a visual refresh that included a new color palette, proprietary illustrations, and better use of their own original photography. We explored the brand's language, and established strategic core messaging. Inspired by their institution's approach of focusing on the whole child, we oriented around the idea of focusing on Every Student, Every Day and guiding tenets of Love. Learn. Lead.
Branding that has “legs”, wings, and heart
In order to integrate all the various schools together Fine Humans developed a new and more cohesive logo system. The anatomy of the core brand mark is the spiritual successor of their old brand’s mascot of an eagle, while made more meaningfully to include unique elements that speak directly to what makes SVA unique. We believe in creating agile brands that have “legs” meaning they can adapt and maximize on how they capitalize, able to meet any opportunity head-on. We expanded the identity into a beautiful secondary seal and mark and developed an abbreviated SVA Every Student Every Day lockup that is easily memorable through its visual balance and linguistic flow.
Providing a guiding light
For future internal brand ambassadors we provided a comprehensive brand specification document that establishes rules for logo usage, typography, color, top level messaging and supporting assets.
Redesigning an important website resource
Fine Humans strategically organized content centric wireframes and visually redesigned the website in the new brand in alignment with Sun Valley’s short term and long term goals. Aside from communicating more clearly and effectively, the website also had to be a resource for existing and prospective parents to easily identify and access SVA’s schools as well as a variety of resources, events, and actionable ideas. Parents can learn about the school's philosophy of loving the whole child bodily, intellectually, and emotionally.
Providing a smooth transition
Our team built the new responsive website on the Wordpress CMS intended for handoff and trained SVA’s internal team for future website management.
Creating robust brand assets for a successful multichannel marketing approach.
Working alongside Sun Valley Academy’s marketing team we created targeted ads based on location and a more generalized door-to-door campaign material based on the newly established brand direction. We worked with SVA to create the Spanish versions across all marketing tools and materials including physical displays, signage, internal and external powerpoint templates. In addition we developed design templates around use cases for their various social media channels. In alignment with SVA’s goals we provided an email marketing campaign in the new brand. And in our effort to be as helpful as possible we explored and provided tools to make future digital marketing campaigns more easily customized and launched.
