The local primary school is a Federation of two small village schools – Corris and Pennal, sharing their [award-winning] Head between both sites, as well as pooling resources and teacher skills to enhance the children’s learning, sharing and local identity.
With pressures of pupil numbers needed to keep these small schools viable, the Head saw the benefit in making the schools more visible and welcoming to parents and pupils – with new School signs.
The illustrated design cleverly uses the same basic structure for both signs, but includes the local landscape features, tree planting and colours in simple block graphics for a cool, child-friendly and unique visual style for the schools. The typical Dyfi forest pines are tighly-packed overlapping triangles, steep bracken-covered valley sides and clear streams. The Pennal landscape is more open fields, dotted with round oaks and a slate stone hump-back bridge… all reduced to geometric shapes and flat colours.
The bright colours, bold and friendly typefaces, clearly-related logo holding device and school motto in hand-written font all help to define what a great partnership the schools have.
The panels are produced on weather-proof Dibond for cost-effective and long-life service, with locally-sourced Oak posts to give a natural and durable appeal.
The resulting signs had the children squealing with delight when we shared the designs in the classroom – a sure sign that we got it right!