Brandland at City of Norwich School
By Holly Howarth, Deputy Faculty Leader in Creative Technologies and Helen Spurway, Communications Lead, City of Norwich School, an Ormiston Academy
A group of Year 10 graphic art students at City of Norwich School (CNS), recently took part in an exciting pilot scheme run by Brandland, with the aim of nurturing new talent and developing an interest in branding, design, and careers in the creative industries. Local design and marketing agencies BuxtonThreeTwo, Sponge, and krow.x, came together with CNS alumnus George Colley who owns Norwich-based Brick Pizza, and lecturer Andy Judd from Norwich University of the Arts, to deliver a brand workshop in which they worked with the students on a design brief.
Thinking outside the box
During the session, the students were tasked with inventing a new child-focused sub-brand for Brick and designing pizza boxes for the new brand. The students were split into small teams and competed against each other to produce the best sub-brand and design, receiving mentorship from the industry experts. The session allowed the students to learn more about the role of branding and how this translates into business, talk to industry specialists, and to participate in a real-life work-based design experience. Schemes such as this can add emphasis to important learning elements within the curriculum, increase student engagement and lead to better academic performance. They also help students to learn about how studying Graphic Communications can translate into a career in the creative industries.
Simply the Beast!
The exercise resulted in some great work and Brick Pizza owner George had the difficult job of selecting the winning design which, after much deliberation, was awarded to students Kaitlyn and Ivana. Their design combined CNS's ‘3Ps’ (polite, punctual and prepared) with ingredients beginning with the same letter. Other great designs included a skater culture-inspired pizza box and one that had the logo 'Simply the Beast!' with the devil popping up from behind a brick wall!
The winning design
Kaitlin and Ivana will now see their design professionally worked up and printed on boxes for use in Brick Pizza. And of course, at the end of the session, everyone enjoyed a margarita pizza for lunch. We hope that following the success of this inaugural workshop, the scheme can be rolled out as a programme to other schools in the region, with City of Norwich School becoming the lead.
Brandland is a network organisation for people and companies working in the branding sector and was founded in 2020 by Robert Jones, Professor of Brand Leadership at Norwich Business School, in collaboration with Creative UEA and Norwich University of the Arts. With Norwich already home to some of Britain’s biggest brands and top creative agencies, Brandland hopes to turn the city into a world-leading hub of branding and design.