Description:

New Shoots is an early childcare community with 16 centres across New Zealand’s North Island. Each purpose-built centre is designed and created in collaboration with architects, spatial designers, engineers, landscape architects and early childhood professionals in order to build environments inspired by nature, where children, parents and teachers could feel nurtured and thrive.

While their architecturally award-winning centres were getting recognised as best in class, the brand’s identity felt dated and didn’t reflect its vision for the future.

We were approached to develop a new brand platform and a refreshed visual identity for the brand. Utilising our platform process, we undertook workshops to develop a distinct proposition that reflected the nature of New Shoots centres, while being child and community-focused.

The proposition 'Naturally Inspired to Thrive' was developed - which spoke directly to the benefit of being part of an exciting and modern environment, while tapping into what families want for their child's development. This proposition became our overarching design idea, creating a rich and exciting space for us to build a new identity for the brand.

Our refreshed logo uses a clean sans serif word mark – crafted to feel pure and modern, yet approachable and friendly. It cleverly incorporates a graphic brand icon (referred to as the Thriving Shoots) which resembles plants rising from their baseline. These ‘Thriving Shoots’ represent the children and people that make up the New Shoots community, growing together side by side; feeling nurtured, supported and inspired to naturally thrive.

We complimented the new logo with a more sophisticated colour palette, drawn from nature and the beautiful centres themselves. Pairing it with a stylised geometric aesthetic, we defined a consistent brand visual language that flows harmoniously throughout all illustrations, iconography and other brand assets.

We created a Brand Book which detailed New Shoot’s new visual language, applying it across a range of digital, print, wayfinding, apparel and marketing touchpoints - which are now being rolled out nationally across the centres.

The result is a warm and engaging new identity for the brand, which not only now aligns with their inspiring centres, but also reflects the true values of the brand. It’s a change which has been embraced by the business and its community.