Our new identity is inspired by our community and built for our future.
It all starts here. This guide is your go-to resource for understanding and applying our design and communications assets, helping you be a good steward of the PS 295 Brooklyn brand.
Over the past thirty years, Public School 295 Brooklyn has served a richly diverse family community representing South Slope Brooklyn and beyond. Together we celebrate our name “The Studio School of Arts and Culture,” weather challenges with determination, and empower our students, teachers, staff, and families with hope and joy.
As we look ahead, our small but mighty school prepares for a new chapter that is still yet to be written.
We are 295. Come dream with us.
Our look may have changed, but our purpose hasn’t. At PS 295, we believe in a constructivist approach to education. Our mission is to nurture proactive, joyful, and courageous learners, every single day. Since it’s introduction in 2024, the brand identity has become so much more than a logo. It is a celebration of who we are.
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These brand values are at the cornerstone of the new communications strategy:
We are small but mighty. The student-to-teacher ratio is part of our strength, allowing every child to have a personal, powerful, and well-supported education experience.
Everyone is known and loved. We foster a focus on kindness, kindness, responsibility, equity, and inclusion with a can-do attitude that we can accomplish more together.
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This is a unique moment in our school’s history, marking three decades nurturing joyful and courageous learners and serving both the South Slope and Greenwood Heights neighborhoods.
Following the disruptive years of pandemic, leadership changes, and citywide student population declines, the introduction of a new brand strategy in 2024 was a unique opportunity to present a strong, united, and growth-oriented vision for our school.
It’s time to step forward.
The funding for these brand updates had zero budget impact on PS 295. The Family Teacher Association’s 2023-24 budget surpluss covered the initial costs of new printed materials and digital upgrades. The complete set of professional designs are a pro-bono project of a PS 295 parent, Armistead Booker.
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Prior to adoption, these brand guidelines were proposed to all school leadership, teachers, staff, and Family Teacher Association to collect feedback and garner support for these ideas.
All community members are invited to continue being involved in the ongoing process to strengthen our school and communicate our story to families, neighbors, district, and the city.
Beyond graphic design and content decisions, the big picture idea for this branding is that the community of PS 295 Brooklyn is ready to grow into the future.
Logo
Introducing our Identity
Our new logo brings together three visual elements of our dynamic neighborhood: Brownstone Brooklyn, Green-Wood Cemetery, and the NYC Waterfront.
It communicates the importance of play in our school: using a lively font, cheerful colors, and a layout that resembles a child jumping or group of kids together.
The logo is easy to read at any size, using a flexible layout that aids in translation. It also shifts focus of past logos from specific arts programming to a more abstract concept of expression, culture, and diversity.
Jump for joy — logo inspiration
Full color logo overlay on an image
Multi-lingual formats in brand colors
One color with school address included
Pride is alive at PS 295 in brand colors
Duotone format in brand colors
Using our Logo
We are very proud of our logo. Follow these guidelines to ensure it always looks its best. Our primary logo is the combination of our icon (the PS 295) and the wordmark, which includes multiple versions with the short and long names of our school:
PS 295 Brooklyn
PS 295: The Studio School of Arts and Culture Brooklyn
Our icon is a shorter version of our logo. Use the icon on its own only if you do not have enough room for the full logo or in cases when the PS 295 brand has already been established. While the icon can exist without the wordmark, the wordmark should never exist without the icon.
Our logo features a variety of layouts and formats to suit a wide range of evolving needs. Even with that flexibility, it’s important to maintain a consistent usage wherever it appears, especially in recurring applications, such as banners, social posts, merchandise, and flyers.
In most cases, prefer using the “stacked” version of the logo, with the icon above the wordmark.
Stacked (left) and Horizontal (right) formats
Circular Emblem formats
Logo Do’s and Don’ts
It's important that the appearance of the logo remains consistent. The logo should not be misinterpreted, modified, or added to. Its orientation, color, and composition should remain as indicated in this document — there are no exceptions.
Our logo should always be legible and impactful. Always apply a healthy amount of visual padding around the logo and the icon to isolate the brand from competing visual elements such as a busy area of an image, low contrast areas where legibility is compromised, or on top of text or supporting graphics. Simple is best.
Keep in mind the surrounding colors and select a logo that best works against that approved brand color. When possible, use the full color logo. The black logo should be used on light colored backgrounds. The white logo should be used on dark colored backgrounds.
Color
Our Color System
Our color palette provides distinctiveness and differentiation through the consistent use of PS 295’s most iconic and recognizable colors:
Harbor Blue
Brownstone Orange
Greenwood Forest
Pink Dreams
In previous iterations of the PS 295 brand identity, black, white, red, and blue were dominant colors.
This new palette introduces a warmer set of colors, inspired by world cultures and our vibrant neighborhood, that can be used in a wide range of combinations.
Meet the Palette
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Harbor Blue
HTML #2e79be / CMYK 81 48 0 0
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Brownstone Orange
HTML #f26322 / CMYK 0 76 99 0
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Greenwood Forest
HTML #2dbba8 / CMYK 71 0 43 0
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Pink Dreams
HTML #bf4a9b / CMYK 24 85 0 0
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Sky's The Limit
HTML #38c6f4 / CMYK 62 0 0 0
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Golden Hour
HTML #f7d20a / CMYK 4 14 100 0
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Courageous Ink
HTML #000000 / CMYK 75 68 67 90
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Purple Connection
HTML #5852a3 / CMYK 77 78 0 0
Type
Our Font System
Utilitarian yet beautiful with a few unique quirks, our primary fonts are designed to carefully balance expression with function and is used in all brand expressions.
Print fonts:
Arya
Open Sans
DIN Condensed
Web fonts:
Archivo Black
Lato
By comparison, NYC Department of Education’s Style Guide uses Helvetica Neue across all materials. PS 295’s font system provides a visually distinct look from DOE content.
This new system presents a primary header font and body copy font, plus a supporting san serif font, that can work seamlessly together in any combination alongside the logo for any application, formal or informal. Most of these accessible fonts are available in Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Fonts, and Squarespace.
Primary font families
Supporting font families
Font color applications
Icons
Our New Iconography
Historically, icons were created independently across teams, projects, and events, leading to a patchwork of styles and visual languages. Built as a global toolkit, PS 295’s icons now follow a single standardized approach – flexible enough to work across every cohort and sub-brand, but unified enough to feel unmistakably our school.
A minimalist bumblebee icon intentionally will appear in select touchpoints across the brand, bringing a unified design to the school mascot for the first time in 30 years.
