Four Schools, One District, and a Brand That Finally Looks Like Family

Background

Eastpointe Community Schools runs four K-5 buildings: Bellview, Crescentwood, Forest Park, and Pleasantview. Each one has its own neighborhood and its own personality. Forest Park had spent years building a real culture around its bears. Crescentwood, the smallest and farthest west, feels quieter and more close-knit. Pleasantview runs competitive and proud. And the whole district is anchored by a shamrock, a clover that shows up in the city’s identity and the district’s own circular logo.

This one came to us through the community, not a cold pitch. Caitlyn Kienitz, the district’s Communications and Marketing Coordinator, was searching for a local logo designer when she connected a name she kept seeing in Eastpointe community groups to a marketing agency right in the district’s backyard. Her reasoning was simple. Work with someone who already knows the community and cares about it as much as the schools do.

The Challenge

The four schools shared no visual system, and some barely had a mascot identity to begin with. Bellview and Crescentwood were carrying the same mascot and the same colors as each other. Pleasantview’s colors were a genuine mystery. Ask five people and you got blue, red and black, green and gold, or a shrug. Nobody could say what they’d ever officially been.

That’s a familiar spot for any organization that grew building by building. Pieces that don’t line up. No single source of truth. And no clean answer when a teacher, a parent volunteer, or a print shop needs a logo file. For a district actively trying to build community, that inconsistency was working against the goal.

The design problem underneath was the fun part. Each school needed to feel like its own place. But the district needed to read as one. Too much uniformity kills each school’s pride. Too little and you’ve got four unrelated logos that happened to land in the same town.

The Approach

We started with the community’s own voice. The district surveyed staff, parents, and students at every building, and it didn’t just ask about colors and animals. It asked what two or three qualities each school wanted its mascot to stand for. Those answers drove everything.

Forest Park’s bear came back protective and strong, the way a bear looks after its cubs. Bellview’s bee reflected the hardworking, busy-as-a-bee energy that kept surfacing. Crescentwood landed on the coyote, paired with teamwork, compassion, and grit. Pleasantview stayed fierce and competitive as the panthers.

From there, the guiding idea was simple: siblings, not twins. Every mascot shares the same illustration style, the same badge construction, and the same energy. So the four schools clearly belong to one family. Then color, animal, and attitude keep each one distinct. Crescentwood took navy and slate to suit a coyote’s coolness. Bellview took royal blue and gold for the bee. Forest Park kept the red and black it had already earned, and Pleasantview built its panther on deep green and gray.

The clover is what quietly holds the set together. Instead of bolting a district logo onto each mark, we worked the shamrock in two ways. It’s the badge shape behind each lockup, echoing the district’s circular clover. And it’s a small clover held by each mascot. That’s the thread that says “same district” without shouting over any school’s identity.

Every school got a complete system built for real use. A full-color primary lockup for when you have the room. The mascot isolated for social profiles and left-chest embroidery. An isolated text mark for when the words need to carry the load, the same way Nike moves between its swoosh, its wordmark, and the two together. We built grayscale versions of all of it for single-color printing and low-contrast placements, and we prepared print-ready and web-ready files for every variation.