St Werburgh’s Park, Rosemary, and The Limes have been working together as the Central Bristol Nursery Schools Federation for many years. Each school had its own hand-drawn logo, full of character and history, but none had ever been turned into a proper vector file. That’s a common story with older, much-loved artwork: it was designed for a different era, long before anyone needed to blow it up for a banner or shrink it down for a favicon. Try either, and the original drawings started to pixelate.
It gave us a nice problem to solve: three schools with three distinct, well-loved identities, federated together but with nothing shared to show for it. CBNSF needed a mark that could represent all three schools at once, work at any size, and still feel like it belonged to each of them.
So last year we built CBNSF a new website. This year, the schools came to us to solve the logo.
Three schools, three logos, one problem
CBNSF brings together three of Bristol’s nursery schools: St Werburgh’s Park, Rosemary, and The Limes. Each had its own logo, and each logo had been hand-drawn at some point in the past with no vector version ever created. That meant every time one got enlarged for signage or shrunk down for a favicon, it pixelated and picked up artefacts. Three lovely, characterful marks that simply couldn’t do the job a modern logo needs to do.
The brief wasn’t to replace any of that character. It was to bring the three settings together under a single federation-wide identity that could actually scale, while keeping something of what made each school’s original mark its own.
Building in the heritage
We worked closely with the teams at all three schools throughout the design process, and the new logo pays a subtle nod to each of the old ones. The children from St Werburgh’s Park’s original mark, the shape from Rosemary’s, and the tree from The Limes’ all found their way into the final design. Rosemary Nursery School is Bristol’s oldest nursery school, with a history dating back to the 1920s, so keeping a thread back to that heritage mattered.
Around those elements we built a colour palette inspired by Bristol’s balloons, paired with hand-drawn linework to keep the warmth of the original artwork. The whole thing was designed to sit comfortably alongside the CBNSF website palette we built the year before, so the identity feels joined up across everything the federation puts out.
From screen to signage
Over the summer, Signs Now installed the new signage across all three nursery school sites, and it looks incredible in place.
We provided CBNSF with vector artwork, alongside versions they can use in-house, so the logo holds up whether it’s on a banner outside the gate or a favicon in a browser tab.
