We recently went through a process to refine our brand and website. We thought “branding” was all about logos, PR, and convincing people to buy things they don’t really need. Boy were we wrong! On the contrary, this branding process was deeply meaningful and productive, and struck at the heart of what ����ý is all about.

It all started about a year ago, when we engaged the (excellent!) design firm on our website redesign. Our original website was totally homemade and we wanted a bit more polish. Here are some early design ideas from SP-CE:

A core value at ����ý is student buy-in, so of course we asked students (and teachers) for feedback on these designs. The feedback was surprisingly consistent: the designs looked too polished and too “commercial”. But… wasn’t more polish the whole point of this exercise? One student wrote: “Some of the ideas are good but none of them are really giving ����ý [...] It looks like the ads you see on the skytrain.” We had uncovered something that’s important to us: authenticity. A school needs to maintain credibility. Still, it has been our experience that the sheen of infallibility and gloss affected by many organizations interferes with the vulnerability and authenticity needed to form the bonds that real community and strong education are founded on. At ����ý we aim to speak openly, own up to our mistakes, and develop real human connections. A design that is too commercial, too polished, too reminiscent of an advertisement, doesn’t align with that realness and vulnerability. Our website is meant less as an advertisement trying to sell you something and more as an invitation — to be curious and to learn more about our community.

Following this first iteration we continued to brainstorm. The “aha moment” struck with this image:

What a great photo! It evokes STEM, but rather than a schematic for a machine, this is a blueprint of a community — something so important to ����ý. The image is technical but artistic; it’s precise but creative; and it evokes the theme of a work in progress. Seeing this photo unlocked what would become our final designs, based on AI-generated blueprints:

These designs resonate with us and, perhaps more importantly, with our students. To us, they resolve the paradox of needing to be polished yet authentic at the same time. If you’d like, take a look at our redesigned website at . (We put together the site ourselves using the designs from SP-CE.)

The final piece of our visual redesign was our logo. To create a balance with the more “organic”-looking design elements above, our new logo is more conservative with clean lines:

Our branding process included not only a visual overhaul but also reexamining our values. A school is a vast collection of people and processes, all interacting in complex ways to manifest the experience that a student, parent, or teacher has at that school. It’s challenging to embody the shape of that experience with a few pithy words, but it’s also a useful exercise to try.

The results can be found on our new values page. One change we made was to expand the notion of character-building to encompass not only virtue but also important qualities like curiosity, which we deeply value. We also emphasized that student buy-in includes both respecting students’ time (i.e., avoiding busywork, or repeating content that students already know) and also involving students in decision making (through our democratic process in school meetings). The biggest change was adding a new value: striving. We believe in striving and continuously challenging ourselves, even if this means being uncomfortable along the way. We realized over time that this principle guides many decisions at ����ý, and wanted to explicitly highlight this on our site.

What makes a good school? Some may contend that there is a universal answer, and indeed we can agree that schools should aim to meet certain minimum standards in areas like health, safety, respect, and care. Beyond that, though, every organization sets priorities and makes tradeoffs. We do not delude ourselves into believing that ����ý (or any school) is the best school for every single student; rather, we try to be clear about who we are and be the best school we can in serving our community of families and teachers. We are a community that prioritizes challenge, STEM (for everyone, not just certain demographics or echelons of society), good character, and good conversation. 

An important moment in the ����ý journey comes when parents complete the final enrollment documents for admission. This year, we added an explanation of our philosophy and values for families to read through and pledge their intention to support the process. If you’d like to check it out, you can find the ����ý Parent Pledge .

A value is a belief about what is important. It is ultimately values that bring people together or push them apart. For ����ý to find its people, we need to signal our values. We have attempted to do that visually through our design elements and textually through statements of our values. We feel blessed that we’ve been finding our people so far. If you see yourself as a ����ý person, perhaps we will see you too before long!


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