Creating Heroes With Illustration And Design For Schools

We have been approached by several schools since the launch of samandsammie.com, requesting their own personal illustrated characters and signage, to help bring their core values to life. 

Knowing the importance of education and nurturing young minds, this is another great opportunity for Digital 22 to make a difference. As a company we know how important it is to give back to our local community and we like to focus our attention on the younger generation so we can help to guide and influence them in their futures.

Watch the video below to see how we take a sketch and turn it into an illustration!

The first of those to approach us was Plover Primary School. We have previously worked alongside the staff at Plover to put together Design Masterclass for some talented young children in July 2015. We showed the children how we created some of our more well known characters such as Sam and Sammie (We even shared some of top secret hints and tips with them!) and then we let them use their own creative ambition to come up with their own drawings.

It was around this time we started putting together the initial sketches for the schools own personal characters.

Plover Primary School is a very forward thinking school. They had a brilliant idea to create characters that represent the different characteristics of a child’s learning. For example, a character called “Resilient” who learns and excels by making mistakes and coming back fighting (note the plasters from all of her clumsy accidents).

We were given 6 characteristics Create, Challenge, Reflect, Embrace, Resilient, Persevere, and were asked to create 6 characters that would reflect each of these characteristics. Each character had to look like an average child so that the children in the school would be able to relate to and look up to the various characters.

The staff at Plover Primary School were elated with the work we had created for them, and proceeded to request that we re-design their logo, branding and signage for all school material.

Following the reaction at Plover Primary School, word quickly spread about our illustration work, and it wasn’t long before we were contacted by The Kirk Sandall Infant and Junior Schools.

The Kirk Sandall schools wanted to create a collection of superheroes, that would represent unique learning qualities to form a Super Team.

Essentially, the team are able to tackle any challenge and achieve their dreams. They are brilliant individuals but when they work as a team, they are a formidable force. An elaborate metaphor to teach the children to try and attain all of these characteristics to be the best they can be.

We were given 7 learning qualities to work with, these were:

Effort, Talk, Determination, Resilience, Positive Attitude, Collaboration and Reflect. For example, a character called ‘Collaboration’ doesn’t like to be on his own but works much better in a team.

We created a junior super team, with each character having their own super power - reflective of their individual characteristics. Take a look at the full assemble below! Can you guess who's who?

We have received some great feedback from students and staff alike and they have proceeded to request that we re-design their logo, branding and signage for all school material. We created a super-hero emblem (think Junior Avengers) and movie style posters to put up around the school to further amplify the message of each character!

Here at Digital 22, we love to draw and illustrate, creating characters is definitely one of our favourite things to do. It feels great to know that our work is having such a great impact on the younger generations - Improving attendance, productivity and enthusiasm.

We are currently receiving more requests for Illustration and Design for Schools, and we are really excited to get back to work on a group of awesome characters.