northfield mount hermon

Focus on building better humans instead of just better resumés, and college-prep becomes life-prep.

WHAT THEY NEEDED

In the highly competitive community of America’s most elite boarding prep schools, Northfield Mount Hermon stands out by being not so elitist. Founded in 1879 with the promise of “Education for the Head, Heart, and Hand,” NMH has since been populating society with a steady flow of well-rounded leaders and influencers. Where competing schools lure with Ivy League placements and Wall Street jobs, NMH offers a broader wealth of experiences and a more diverse range of curriculum and community. Their graduates enter the world with a higher degree of empathy and a healthier definition of what success means in our world. They’re go-getting do-gooders, and they stand well apart from their starchily uniformed competitors. They just needed their branding to act like it.

WHAT we did

We observed that all the members of the hallowed Eight Schools Association had websites that looked exactly like each other, including NMH’s: drone shot of idyllic New England-in-autumn campus, check; dry and boring copywriting, check; generic students doing generic things, check. Our interviews with NMH students, parents, faculty, alumni, and staff revealed engaging, curious, confident, and fun-loving people all dancing around the maypole of Education for the Head, Heart, and Hand. The first thread of NMH was still weaving its community together, and we knew that we’d find their truest brand expression in their history. We dug into their archives and discovered a discarded logo they’d used in the 70s, a unique, modernist monogram that opened the door to a full graphic language. We found the multifaceted, prismatic personality that as always been and could only be Northfield Mt. Hermon.

 

The Original Logo

Discovered in the archive, this logo from the 70’s was used as the foundation for the new brand identity.