Brains International School – Brand System

Building a brand system for an educational institution

Context

Brains International School is a private bilingual school in Madrid with over 2,000 students. When I joined in 2017, a visual identity existed but was applied inconsistently across departments — marketing, admissions, internal communications and educational materials each operated with different visual criteria.

Challenge

The school produced hundreds of pieces per year across radically different objectives: student recruitment campaigns, institutional communications to families, pedagogical materials for classrooms, and internal documents for staff. None of it felt like it came from the same brand. My role was to change that — not by redesigning the identity, but by building the system underneath it.

Approach

I started by auditing all existing materials and mapping them by audience, objective and channel. From that audit I built a modular template system — covering agendas, dossiers, enrolment forms, price sheets, menus, graduation programmes and extracurricular materials — that encoded the brand criteria so that anyone could produce on-brand content without design knowledge.

The goal was not visual consistency for its own sake. It was operational independence: a brand system robust enough to run without me.

What I Built

• 113+ internal communication projects since 2017, generated from templates built from scratch on day one
• 189+ marketing macro-projects, including recurring campaigns such as the annual Summer Camp
• Channels covered: digital, print, large format, social media, interactive PDFs and learning platforms (iTunes U, Canva for Education)

Result

The template system proved its resilience during my two maternity leaves — the school continued producing on-brand material without external design support. That was the real test.

My Role

Sole brand designer. End-to-end ownership: strategy, system design, production and quality control across all channels and departments.