Halcyon Grove School
A concept engagement: a complete admissions design system for an independent K–8 day school — one written token specification driving an eight-page admissions brochure, a poster series, print ads, and a social carousel, rendered end-to-end from the same system.
brochure cover · 3:4 · forest ground, gold inner border, no shadow
Six brand colors; full 10-shade ramps in the spec.
A school's admissions story is told across many hands and many years — a brochure here, an open-house poster there, a seasonal ad, a social post. Without a shared system, each piece drifts: the colors wander, the typography changes, and the institution reads less like one confident school and more like a collection of vendors. Reprints don't fix it, because the drift isn't in any single piece — it's the absence of a written system underneath all of them.
Instead of designing one-off artifacts, I designed the system that produces them:
One human- and machine-readable spec — colors (six full 10-shade ramps), Playfair Display + Inter type scale, 8px spacing grid, restrained 8px radii, elevation, and component recipes.
Every admissions asset is rendered directly from the tokens, so the brochure, posters, ads, and carousel are provably one system — change a token and the whole campaign re-skins coherently.
The spec's pillars — scholarly warmth (a well-loved letter, not a dashboard), craft & texture (paper grain, letterpress-style borders), and brand confidence (forest green identity, gold reserved for prestige moments) — are written down as do's and don'ts, with documented contrast ratios (ink on canvas ≈ 14:1 AAA; green on cream ≈ 6.5:1 AA) and one sanctioned exception: the deep-forest cover pages.
Token spec
DESIGN.md — token tables, component recipes (brochure cover, stat cards, quote band, step rows, poster formats), contrast notes, do's/don'ts.
Print system
Eight-page A4 admissions brochure (cover, at-a-glance stats, academics, admissions steps, testimonial band) plus a two-poster admissions series — print-ready PDFs.
Digital system
Two seasonal print ads (1080×1080), a three-slide social carousel (1080×1350), and a landing-page polish pass — same tokens, same voice.
System-first delivery. One written spec that designers, staff, and print vendors all read as the source of truth.
Repeatable, coherent output. Tokens keep every new piece on-brand by construction — no per-piece redesign, no drift.
Editorial discipline. Gold used decoratively only; Playfair headings non-negotiable; radii restrained so type and color carry the feel.
Accessibility in the spec. Contrast ratios documented at the token level, not retrofitted.
Print-adjacent depth. Paper-grain texture, letterpress borders, and print-on-table elevation simulated digitally.
Multi-asset range. Brochure, posters, ads, carousel, and landing page shipped from a single system and a single engagement.