Hutchesons’ Grammar School

Hutchesons’ Grammar School is one of Scotland’s top-performing independent schools. Frustrated by the limitations of their proprietary CMS (+ delayed support responses!), Hutchesons’ reached out following a recommendation from their new bursar who we’d previously worked with on a similar project for Ayr’s Wellington School.

Proud of their long-standing record of academic achievement, Hutchesons’ felt their softer, nurturing + creative side was not fully realised by prospective audiences. In order to shift perceptions, we knew we must first prioritise a balanced creative concept. Following our Discovery workshop, two simple words stood out: “Belong” – alluding to family/kinship, + “Excel” – communicating success. We drafted three visual styles around the concept with Hutchie ultimately choosing the bolder, brighter + bluer of the three. Further iterations of the concept softened ‘Excel’ to ‘Achieve’ and included the word ‘Flourish’ to represent the notion of freedom + nurture.

Hutchies’ visual branding had become confused over the years with different font, colour and logo applications. Their crest had also become skewed – we redrew to restore artistic precision + depth. From there, we set about creating a set of guidelines to not only influence the website’s stylesheet but act as a reference to instruct correct application of typography, colours + logo treatments going forward.

Commissioning our go-to photographers, we art directed photoshoots across Hutchie’s Pre-School, Primary and Secondary schools to capture imagery to support the selected creative concept + strapline.

We crafted the web design to showcase Hutchie’s culture + facilities whilst helping prospects find the information they required + perform tasks (e.g submitting a form, downloading a prospectus, booking a tour) as efficiently as possible across all devices. A ‘News’ section + Instagram feed were also prominently positioned to give real insights into Hutchie life, whilst page template designs were kept modular to ensure optimal display across all devices + allow Hutchie’s marketing staff to easily build their own pages using a variety of flexible text, tabbed + media modules.

We were on a mission to not just support business objectives, but streamline business processes too. All event/tour bookings + forms were still being processed manually (often involving a stamp & cheque!) which required unnecessary time + effort from both the user + Hutchie’s admin team. All forms are now online, some integrated with a payment gateway, with application form data being pushed via Zapier to Hutchie’s online spreadsheets for even quicker processing.

Hutchie’s online calendar was also a bit of a muddle. It wasn’t integrated with their internal systems, therefore it had become forgotten about by most departments – it didn’t allow for event bookings + payments either. Integrating with Sharepoint, we developed a calendar solution which could be filtered by the user to hone in on school or department, + was easy for all Hutchie staff to manage, with the option to hide certain events, set capacity + take bookings + payments.