GreenChild Project

The story

When we first met Edwin Pietersen, GreenChild Project's founder, he had ten years of teaching learners living with disabilities behind him, a new platform, Ona Learn, about to reach universities and schools, and a brand that had never kept up. Marketing came in bursts, the colours were too bright to build with, and there had been no website for three years. As Edwin put it, “even our pamphlets and things in our content has never looked pretty, but it's worked for our students.”

He wanted the design language “taken out of our hands”, and the team wanted to keep what people already knew GreenChild by: the mandala, and its greens and purples.

Keeping the mandala

In the first week we showed two directions: a simplified mandala, and a wordmark with a chain-link pattern. The team felt the mandala had lost some of the old logo's childlike warmth, but dropping it was the bigger risk, and Edwin settled it:

“I would prefer to keep that mandala. I really really like it. I think it still contains a lot of what the essence is.”

So we softened it, paired it with Livvic, a rounded typeface that carries both brands, and kept it well away from the soft petals of a yoga retreat, because people outside education, Edwin told us, “think we're a wellness company”. The final mark was a wild card, an extra option we added because it was too strong to leave out. Edwin had made up his mind before we could share our screen, and called it “spectacular”.

One family

The old palette was all bright mid-tones, so we kept the purple, moved the green towards mint and added the lights and darks the team had never had. Ona Learn took the purple and the line “Powered by GreenChild Project”, so the two read as one family.

A petal from the mark became the pattern, and two frames, the Hourglass for GreenChild and the Diamond for Ona Learn, let the team make anything feel on brand without a designer in the room. It all lives in 45 pages of guidelines. Going back through the brand deck, Edwin told us:

“I was getting a little lump in my throat thinking, ‘Wow, GreenChild's all grown up.’”

A website, at last

On the call where Edwin signed off the logo, he found out we build websites too: “Oh, do you guys do that as well? … Oh, yay.” He had already started building one himself.

We designed and built a one-page site that explains both brands in one place, GreenChild in green and Ona Learn in purple, with a path for each of its audiences: schools, universities, corporate funders and parents. Each path ends in an action, and Ona Learn's “Book a demo” gave GreenChild its first way to take bookings. When we asked where it should point, Edwin replied, “I actually don't have a calendar booking slot. This would actually be great.”

The site is custom coded and built with screen readers in mind, and we host and look after it. It went live eight weeks after our first call, and brought the website and the team's email onto one address, greenchildproject.edu.za, a move GreenChild had wanted to make for five years.

Where it landed

Seeing the site for the first time, Edwin said:

“It is absolutely stunning… it's definitely a billion times more than I could ever imagine to be honest, but I think it's actually emotional seeing it.”

By launch week the new language was running through three or four proposals and applications, which Edwin now puts together “by the numbers”, copying the wording and layouts straight across. The pattern is on the teachers' platform he built himself, which, he says, no longer looks like he built it himself. The day before launch, he summed it up:

“It's like we've moved into a new office.”

Scope
Brand refresh, brand architecture, brand guidelines, website design and build, hosting and care

Deliverable
Brand guidelines and asset library for GreenChild Project and Ona Learn, and a custom-coded one-page website