Bank Street Education Center: Joyful Connection
A sub-brand that brings joy and warmth to serious work on equity in schools
Brand identity
Brand strategy
The short version
I led the Bank Street Education Center from a brand workshop to a full identity in about nine weeks.
The Ed Center works with schools and districts to make education more equitable. Its work is serious; its materials looked it.
The identity covers a brand heart, values, an extended palette, a signature squiggle, templates, and guidelines. It lives inside Bank Street College's identity with a voice of its own, joyful, connected, and professional, and it went live on the Ed Center's web pages and across its materials.
The challenge
Its own voice, without breaking from the College
The Ed Center is part of Bank Street College, a century-old institution with its own emblem, font, and colors.
The Ed Center needed to feel like itself, warmer and more hopeful, without breaking from the College. And its audience is wide: teachers, principals, district leaders, funders, and policymakers all needed to take it seriously.
THE WORKSHOP
The team wrote the brand first
Before designing anything, I ran a brand workshop with the Ed Center team.
We wrote the brand heart together (purpose, mission, vision, and action), chose values from a long list, and described the brand as a person: how it would talk, which words fit, and which didn't. A brand matrix helped place the Ed Center against its peers.
The brand workshop, in FigJam.
Three values came out of it: Joy, Continuous Growth, and Community. Joy was the surprise. For an organization working on equity, it became the thing that set the brand apart.
Brand heart.
Brand values.
DIRECTIONS
Three directions, combined into one
I presented three directions, each with its own moodboard.
Connected together
Friendly and imaginative, built around a squiggle drawn from the Bank Street "B".
Take action
Energetic and progressive, with DIY textures and bold type.
Joyful modern
Warm and professional, with rounded shapes and soft color.
Connected together.
Take action.
Joyful modern.
Round one moodboards: inspiration from other brands, used to align on a direction.
The team's feedback pointed to a mix, so round two combined them into Joyful connection: the squiggle and doodle icons from the first, the confidence of the third, and color that felt joyful without feeling childish.
Round two: Joyful connection, the direction we built.
The system
Built on the College, with joy added
The Ed Center keeps the College's foundations and adds two colors, a warmer voice in type, and a signature squiggle.
Built on the College
The Bank Street emblem, Lato, and the core blue, green, orange, and grey stay. Two new colors, Ed Center Yellow and Ed Center Pink, add the joy.
A color mix for each portfolio
Culture, Race, and Equity; K–12 Math; Early Childhood; and Responsive Design each feel distinct but related.
A warmer voice in type
IBM Plex Serif Italic for subheads, alongside Lato.
The squiggle
A looping line drawn from the curve of the “B.” It frames photos, circles the people in them, fills backgrounds, and connects ideas on a page, a visual version of “community.” Doodle icons match its hand.
Color palette.
A color mix for each portfolio.
Primary font.
Secondary font.
Typography.
The squiggle.
Photo treatment.
Backgrounds.
Iconography.
Built to be used
Templates, so the team never needs a designer
A brand only works if the team can use it without a designer.
I delivered 16 pages of guidelines, an 87-slide presentation template in PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides, a starter deck built on 15 layouts, report layouts, social templates, one-pagers for each portfolio, and a website example with recommendations for aligning their pages.
The presentation template.
Social posts.
Reports.
The website example.
THE RESULT
Still in use, and growing
The brand went live on the Ed Center's web pages and across its materials.
In 2025, the team came back to extend it into Word and Google Doc templates, so even everyday documents match the decks. Their portfolio overview decks for 2025–26 still assign each portfolio its color from the system.
Serious work, serious-looking materials
→
A joyful, connected brand
No voice of its own
→
A sub-brand that builds on the College
Every document from scratch
→
An 87-slide template, report layouts, and social templates
What I learned
Extend the parent, don’t fight it
Keeping Bank Street College’s emblem, font, and colors, and adding a palette and squiggle of its own, let the Ed Center feel joyful without looking like a different organization.
Let the team write the brand
The values came out of the workshop, so the design was expressing something the team already believed, not something I handed them.
A brand sticks in the files people open every day
The team came back in 2025 to extend it into Word and Google Docs. Templates, not guidelines, are what kept it in use.
