One of the things I love about freelancing in graphic design is it’s so interesting. You never know what the next project will be. This time it is a logo for a school in – yes – Paraguay.
Escuela Nuevas Alturas (or in English, New Heights School International) is an accredited school with The Ministry of Education in Paraguay devoted to building academic excellence and to providing educational opportunity to the poorest of Paraguay’s poor and street children so that through education its students will make a positive impact in their families, their communities and their world despite their poverty.
The school has been ‘adopted’ by my friends Carey and Susan Mossop, whom you may remember from this post. They have recently started a travel blog called Our Nomadic Experience to chronicle their cost conscious world travelling retirement. Carey and Susan have taken on the task of raising funds in North America for this very deserving project and as a first step they saw the need to rebrand it, more clearly communicating the vision of lifting children out of poverty through education and giving them opportunity.
We started with the existing marketing (below) and looked at what we could work with and what needed reinterpreting. It was agreed that the bird concept was solid. It portrayed soaring, hope, strength. The bird on the existing marketing was a bald eagle which are not native to Paraguay so we wanted to rethink that part of it. Paraguay is a land locked nation so the mountain / ocean background also had to be revamped. At first a Black Hawk was suggested but we decided it didn’t have the right feel … too black and heavy … no light hearted childlike feel there at all.
What I discovered upon research is that Paraguay has many flocks of waterbirds in the undeveloped Gran Chaco region, a mostly uninhabited, semi-arid savanna, which covers the western half of the country.
A flock of wetland birds … hmmm now that seemed to have possibilities on several levels: soaring / group of children / flock of birds / native species.
I came up with several variations of this concept for them but this is the one they went with.
