Eight Herricks High School students are helping the district refresh its branding.
The district picked students in the ninth through 12th grades as finalists in a contest to redesign the district’s logo, an update Superintendent Fino Celano said is a long time coming.
“No one is in a better position to create a logo that reflects our district than our students who live and learn in our school community,” Celano said in an email.
The district launched the contest in the fall to revamp the current logo, an outdated stock image a web designer chose that doesn’t reflect the district’s mission, Celano said.
It solicited designs from students in Herricks High School’s various graphic design programs, overseen by teacher Allyson Zebrowski.
The students used professional design programs, including Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop, to create their logos.
From the field of 19 entries, Zebrowski and others selected the eight finalists: George Araujo, Jillian Clark, Samantha Hackenjos, Emily Nagle, Maeve O’Brien, Angelica Pizza, Jessica Tichauer and Desmond Wong.
“It was really hard to pick finalists,” Zebrowski said. “Everyone did an amazing job.”
All the designs featured blue, Herricks High School’s signature color, and the district’s name.
Some of the designers said they also tried to reflect the district’s mission and character in their logos.
For example, Pizza said she enclosed her design in a circle to represent unity, and O’Brien included a tree to represent growth.
“The branches represent branching out,” O’Brien told a panel of design-contest judges at a Dec. 19 presentation. “It’s about being together, but also being yourself.”
Wong designed his logo to represent look like a house, which is “what Herricks has built,” he said.
The panel, which includes Celano, is still in the process of choosing a winner and will likely announce one sometime this spring.
Rather than outsource the logo design to a private company, Celano said, getting designs from students “reflects (the district’s) philosophy of empowering our students, and recognizing their outstanding work.”
“I believe that our students will do a much better job in creating a new logo than a commercial company could ever do,” Celano said.
