Creating a Shared Identity Rooted in Place
Client St Teilo’s School
Project Pilgrims. A mascot identity for students to own, connecting them to place and a shared sense of belonging.
Why It Mattered
A school is more than a place of education. It is where identity begins to take shape.
For students, those early years are a period of movement. Learning, growing, and gradually finding direction. A sense of connection, to place and to one another, plays an important role in that process.
St Teilo’s is a Christian school rooted in faith, growth and guidance. Head teacher Ian Loynd had seen how shared identities, often expressed through mascots, could help bring students and communities together.
The opportunity here was to create something that could do the same. Not as a badge or label, but as something students could recognise themselves in.
Building on the Foundations
A few years earlier, I worked with the school to develop a broader visual identity across the environment and website.
That work established a clear and consistent foundation. The next step was more specific. Something that belonged to the students themselves.
The brief was to create an identity that students could gather around.
It needed to feel relevant across all age groups, connected to the school’s Christian heritage, and contemporary enough to sit naturally within the wider identity.
More importantly, it needed to support a stronger sense of connection within the school. Something that could be shared, recognised and carried by the students themselves.
The Idea
We explored a number of directions, each carrying a different tone. Some felt bold and forward-facing. Others more inclusive and steady.
We kept returning to a simple observation.
Students are not expected to arrive fully formed. They are in motion, learning, growing, and finding direction over time.
From that, the idea of Pilgrims emerged.
Not as something heavy or symbolic, but as a shared journey. A way of describing where students are, rather than where they should be.
Shaping the Identity
The visual identity centred on a leaping stag, drawn from Welsh heritage and associated with St Teilo and St Edeyrn.
The intention was to create something balanced.
Confident, but not aggressive.
Strong, but approachable.
Youthful enough for students to see themselves in it.
The form was simplified to ensure it could work across a wide range of applications, from embroidery to large-scale graphics.
Particular attention was given to posture, expression and proportion, ensuring the mark suggested movement and direction without becoming overly illustrative.
Alongside the primary mark, a supporting system was developed to allow the identity to be used flexibly.
It needed to move easily from small, everyday items such as uniforms and stationery, through to larger applications across the school environment.
The aim was consistency without rigidity. A system that could be adopted naturally as part of daily school life.
Built Together
The identity has given students a shared reference point within the school.
Not as something fixed, but as part of an ongoing journey shaped by the people within it.
A simple idea, made visible, and carried by the people it belongs to.
Working on something that needs to be felt, not just seen?
I help shape the thinking, identity and environment so they work together, and hold meaning over time.