In August I was tasked with freshening up the school prospectus document wallet for Ashford Oaks Community Primary School. They have existing branding and a logo that they didn’t want to alter. Although, they didn’t have the source files, so I had to do some work to bring them up to scratch.

They wanted the new prospectus wallet to reflect the new curriculum and values that had been named by the students: Dare to Dream. The new wallet would also reflect the current student body, with only children in Year 3 or below being featured. I had their old wallet as sample… several of the children on it were old enough to work at the school!

Unfortunately, they had their photographer in during the July 2022 heatwave, and the majority of children were in non uniform. This left me with very few photographs that I was able to use for official documentation. In mid August a small group of students gathered to do a photoshoot around the school. We worked with poor natural lighting and ongoing maintenance work, but we pulled it off!

Prospectus Rough Drafts

I set to work creating some rough drafts. There were six rough drafts in total and some of them were…very rough! I selected these three to share with the school. I presented a variety of options so they could narrow down what they wanted, having not given me a brief to work with initially.

Narrowing it Down

I was not commissioned by an individual at the school, it was a team. That also meant that they all needed to approve certain design aspects and photographs. The team voted to keep the third design base to work with, and didn’t need me to make many changes.

We found the shade of yellow used in the ‘swoop’ on the cover of the school prospectus was too bright. The shade I had selected as a place holder didn’t match the shade used on the school uniform. They also preferred the way the contact information was aligned in the first draft option.

Creating the School Prospectus

So, with a little bit of jigging about, the next draft was well under way. We only went back and forth another couple of times before it was ready to be laid onto the template provided by the printing company they used.

When I had created the original drafts for the school prospectus wallet I accounted for the bleed and folding spines. Even though I had created those spaces in the design I still had some fine tuning to do. I made sure the ‘swoops’ lined up and the photographs were well within the safety area. After a final check of the spelling and contact details I sent the final draft off to the school. I sent them the print ready version and a lower quality version with the template overlay so they could see where the folds would be!

Do you need me to design a school prospectus or document wallet?

You can hire me to design any of your printed documents!