Brooke Charter Schools Mascot Designs
This was such a fun and unique project that we couldn’t resist sharing our process! We were tasked with creating mascots for three of the Brooke Charter Schools: the Roslindale Dragons, the Mattapan Falcons, and East Boston Bulldogs. The mascots needed to feel like part of the same set, to be versatile for many different applications, and have a slightly friendly feel since they’re for K-7.
Projects that tend to be heavily stylized tend to go through more rounds of design development, and we’ll walk you through what this process looks like.
Kick-off meeting
We like to put together a mood board to review with our clients during our first call. This entails searching for images that are applicable to the project and then we categorize these reference images to help guide our discussion. The allows us to leave the meeting feeling like we’re in a good place to being sketching.
Concept sketches
Depending on the client we will share our concepts sketches before showing them our cleaned up drafts created in Illustrator, or whichever design application we’re using for the project.
We tend to do these concept sketches in ProCreate for iPads.
First round of design
We still consider the first few rounds of the design to be sketches even though they’ve been cleaned up and brought into Illustrator. For this first round we focused on consistency and friendliness, but they ended up being a bit too friendly for our client.
Second Round of Design
The second round we kept the same form, but created a more stern expression. For this round the sketches were too static for our client.
Third and final round of design
We switched gears to use the school crest as the unifying element of each mascots. We made them a bit more abstract and angular, and as requested by our client used a paw print as opposed to the bulldogs face and body. We have also added in the school colors and name.
“Thank yall so much. They turned out better than I could have imagined. Thanks for engaging in all of the back and forth on the design. I have worked with some designers who have gotten upset as we go through the iterations so I appreciate your patience and understanding. But I especially appreciate your ability to nail the designs so perfectly. Yall are very talented.” ”