About My First Skool
My First Skool is a pre-school under the NTUC Social Enterprise umbrella. It has been around for a long time (40 years), and there are currently 120 branches in Singapore. With such a controversial spelling of 'school', one would expect its logo to be playful and colourful.
That was the case. Until now.
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| Before/after |
My First (Boring) Skool
The old logo had its flaws – too many details and an overweight 'r', but other than that, it actually resembled a pre-school logo. Even with the random arrangement of letters, the logo was surprisingly balanced.
Sadly, the new logo (released in 2016) looks nothing like a pre-school logo. Remember, we are talking about students less than 5 years old, and they are more attracted to colourful things rather than dull, corporate-looking stuff. I appreciate the clean and professional typeface, but it loses its authenticity because of 'skool'. Now, it looks like a spelling error instead of an intentional spelling of the word.
Colours
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| Old vs new colours |
The colours used also contributed to this static mess. Having 1 or 2 corporate colours is a common practice in the industry so customers can easily recognise brands. However, many pre-school logos have more than 3 colours, especially when every letter of the school's name has a different colour. The colour palette for the old logo was very bright and colourful, similar to other pre-school colour palettes. This is probably one of the rare few times when an overly colourful logo is acceptable and even expected.
The new colour combination can be used for a construction company. It is dull and one could never guess that this combination is for a pre-school. Why use 2 dark colours instead of having 2 contrasting colours?
I was thinking of other pre-school programmes which have a dual-colour palette as My First Skool and MindChamps came to mind. Oops, even Mindchamps knows it needs to add more colour to brighten up the logo. It looks amateurish but at least it has more life than My First Skool.
Unidentified Object
What is this?
I went around asking what this was and got pretty weird answers: The Doraemon flying machine, a paintbrush and rubber bands, a human face. I saw a seedling, but only because I saw the words on the logo first.
Normally, if the logo stays as it is (no absence of words) in all applications, I would not go around asking people to tell me what they think of the graphic in the logo. However, My First Skool uses this seedling and logo interchangeably, so it would only make sense for the seedling to look like one instead of a fragile, ambiguous-looking UFO.
Even if they wanted to use this seedling graphic, perhaps explaining the logo on the website would help prevent confusion and X-rated interpretations of it.
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| I needed this photo to convince me that the logo was a seedling. (Source) |
Even if they wanted to use this seedling graphic, perhaps explaining the logo on the website would help prevent confusion and X-rated interpretations of it.
Applications
My First School's brand applications are not so bad, but that is because they are using a different shade of orange. In fact, the logo on the uniform looks nicer than the actual logo thanks to the white/orange colour combination.
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| Print advertisement (Source) |
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| They like circles (Source) |
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| They like circles, pt 2. (Screengrab of the My First Skool website) |
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| They even changed the colour of the logo on the LCD screens (Source) |
These brand applications are by no means ugly, just let down by the terrible logo.
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My First Skool is
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