Create a hip logo for an innovative California charter school!

Urban Montessori Charter School

A small group is working to found a Montessori-based charter K-8 school in Alameda County, CA.

We are creating a unique school that blends the best of Montessori with the latest thinking in Design Thinking skills and Arts Integration. To the best of our knowledge, there is no other school in the country that is proposing this model; our logo should convey our innovative spirit.

Mission
Urban Montessori Charter School develops self-directed and engaged learners who are academically, socially and emotionally prepared to succeed in any high school. They are innovators of tomorrow who will meet the challenges of today’s world with confidence, compassion and grace. Our Montessori environment supports children and families in a multi-age learning community that nurtures individual curiosities, develops childrens' understanding of our urban community, and holds children to a high standard of excellence.

Big Picture Goals
• Children should grow up knowing they can be innovators and have the power to change the world around them
• Purposeful, service-oriented, creative-action projects will be a hallmark of Urban Montessori
• The human-centered design process is symbiotic with tenets of the Montessori Method and the integrated, project-based curriculum of Urban Montessori Charter School

More information at urbanmontessori.org. Any/all visuals/style are placeholder.

Our target audience is the community that our school will be a part of, which includes parents and funders. Montessori schools are typically private because the program is expensive to run; ours will public as we believe Montessori is an ideal model for diverse student groups. "Urban" was chosen specifically to positively connote our likely location in Oakland, CA and the phenomenal diversity of races, ethnicities, religions, family structures and languages that exist in the city and in Alameda County. Our logo should connote our strong belief in this diversity.

Of course, the community includes our students, who will eventually be K-8. The logo should be clean and appropriate for student viewing and use on various school materials.

Living in the Bay Area means that we are surrounded by innovation, with Silicon Valley in our backyard. Our logo should stand up well next to our corporate brothers' and sisters' visuals.

Must contain the name “Urban Montessori Charter School”. May contain the name, or the logo may exist in conjunction with name. Strong visual required; text treatments alone aren't enough. Logo should be usable across a variety of materials, including website, t-shirts, printed collateral. Logo visual should express mission and spirit of school.

File should be delivered as a vector file (.ai) so it can be used for multiple purposes. Or, it should be delivered in a manner that can be used across the various marketing materials listed in the project summary.

Logo should work in color and equally well in black and white.

Possible, but not required, creative directions to explore:

Urban icon, landscape or building(s) rendered in Montessori materials or using montessori materials as a stylistic inspiration for the building, landscape etc.--(pink tower, binomial/trinomial cube, counting beads, knobbed cylinders)

The file Images for Urban Montessori Logo contain possible inspiration sources.

I have attached files that show logos that others have produced that we did not like.

The file urban-montessori-opts-1 drew too much attention to "UM", which is too close to "ummm" and doesn't suggest intelligence. There also are no visual elements.

We liked the options in UMCS_LOGO_v.1 better, but they all lacked visual elements and were a difficult to read in some cases.