After years of branding and graphic inconsistencies at OPRF, official branding graphics and guidelines three years in the making have been released. The effort was worked on by seniors Leigh Maliff, Tim Mellman, and Georgia Smith, junior Hodari Motley, and 2021 graduate Sam Schenkelberg.

The project was initiated by Karin Sullivan, executive director of communications, and Jackie McGoey, communications and community relations coordinator. “I’ve been here for four years; we started this process three years ago,” McGoey said. “At the time, the idea had really been marinating for a while because there really hadn’t been any sort of branding work done for years.”

“The crest that everyone recognizes today was created back in 1908,” McGoey said. “All those years, decades, there were random huskies that came to be, different pawprints, different variations of the orange and blue. So there really wasn’t any consistent visual identity that the school could own.”

Students were not originally going to take the helm. “We had initially hired a branding company to take on this project,” McGoey said. “They were initially going to start with focus groups with students, faculty members, community members.”

“We had gone to the board, we presented the project. But, then we started hearing from alumni,” McGoey said.

Student designer and senior Tim Mellman said that alumni concerns were driven by the extent of the changes. “The proposal was to completely change the logo, including taking away the crest, which the alumni association was very opposed to,” he said. “The school’s compromise was that there would still be an effort to standardize the branding” but “all the central features of the school would be maintained.”

Around this time, graphic design teacher Valerie White offered the communications team student help with the project. “After that, we decided, let’s push back, we’re not going to go forward with the consulting company,” McGoey said.

Mellman found “the concept of designing something that could impact the entire school” to be “fascinating.”

The students “had a great sense of what they wanted to convey, and they were just so talented, and it’s been a pleasure working with them,” McGoey said.

The students were aided by White and graphic design teacher Lindy Novotny. Additionally, athletic director Nicole Ebsen got on board once she was hired in 2021. “She had done a branding project at her former school, Morton. So she was someone we looked to as we were wrapping up” and with rollout, McGoey said. Ebsen came up with the orange and blue on the huskie.

Even during remote learning, Novotny and White kept the project going and continued communicating with the students. “They’re in our classes, so we see these students daily, we check in with them when we see them,” White says. While they discussed the communication department’s wishes, “It was really up to the students 100% to come up with the actual artwork; we just guided them,” she said.

Mellman primarily worked on the new revamped crest. “It was a very long process,” he said.

“When I designed the crest, I wanted to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible. So I made sure to follow the golden ratio as much as possible.” There was some research involved and a lot of effort, Mellman says, on getting the trees right. “It became known in my family as the 50-hour tree.”

The end result bears strong resemblance to graphics used previously in the school. It includes a new crest, huskie, pawprint, shield, color palette, and standard fonts.

McGoey says “the hope” is that the new branding will be used throughout the school. “What we’re telling faculty and staff and students is if you are going to use OPRF’s name on anything, let’s say apparel, use our official font. If you (want) to put a pawprint on it, use our official pawprint. If you (want) to put a huskie face, use the official one,” she says.

“Obviously, we know that’s gonna take time until we fully have that integrated, but the hope is that if we start now, we can get to a place where the new huskie is the only huskie that we recognize,” McGoey says.

Mellman describes the project as having a “soft rollout” as the new crest has already been implemented inside the building, and new academic division logos are planned to come soon.

“I hope people are excited about this change, and I really, really, really, want to give credit to the students,” McGoey says. “I don’t think people really understand the amount of work that it took.”