Capital City Public Charter School
Empowering Next-Gen Innovators
Challenge
Center City Public Charter Schools is committed to academic excellence in Washington, DC, through a curriculum deeply rooted in the liberal arts and humanities. In line with its innovative approach to education, the school is building a 20,000-square-foot STEM-based makerspace to serve its 1,400 students. CCPCS sought Eighty2degrees’ assistance in branding the new space and, three years later, in designing an innovative and dynamic donor wall to recognize the people and organizations that made the makerspace possible.
Approach
Drawing inspiration from strategic thinking and building games such as Tangrams and magnetic building tiles, which nurture imagination and creativity, we created a vibrant, friendly, geometric, type-based logo. By overlapping shapes to create each letterform, we developed a custom typeface for the logomark. In addition to the logo for the new facility, we created assets including a factsheet, a brochure, a brand guide, and a series of templates. The donor wall was inspired by the foundational building-block shapes in the logo, maintaining a strong visual connection to the organization’s brand. Dimensional shapes—using a combination of wood, metal, and PVC, as a nod to the space’s hands-on nature—and dimensional lettering highlight each donor tier. Flourishes and doodles, composed of exclamatory forms and the tools students use in the space, bring energy and foster excitement. We also added secondary messaging to the surrounding I-beams, ensuring the space was branded and vibrant from all angles.
