Hamilton branding and design company LemonGrenade updates area schools’ identities
When Thommy Long of LemonGrenade was contacted by Hamilton High School principal John Wilhelm in 2016 for help in rebranding the school, he was excited to jump on the project.
HHS had been using illustrations around its mascot, the bulldog, but didn’t have anything set in stone when it came to the logo.
“We decided to design a new bulldog identity and name him ‘Big Blue’,” Long said. “We added a ‘BB’ to his collar. We even suggested that the school get a bulldog and take him around during home games and events.”
Long says that once the new HHS logo was made public, other schools from the district began contacting LemonGrenade.
“Garfield Middle School, home of the Garfield Griffins, wanted a new identity as well. With their logo came a new set of challenges,” Long said.
LemonGrenade first had to change the colors — Garfield was originally orange and red, but was changed to blue and gray as established with the high school. The idea was to streamline colors across the district to create connection among the schools.
“The easiest way to do that was through fonts, colors and illustration style,” Long said. “And wow — did we get some negative feedback on changing Garfield’s colors! People have a strong connection to their former schools and some did not like to see the changes we recommended.”
LemonGrenade worked through the opinions and Long says the ultimate decision was to stick with an overall district branding.
“We did give in a little by letting each school pick their own shade of blue, an element of their logo, that they could really own and would be unique to that school.”
Long says one thing he would advise educators to do is watch out for borrowing the logos of existing professional teams … that’s a no-no in the legal world of graphics and media.
“The myth is that if you alter a logo, for example, change the colors, that it is legal to use that logo since you changed it slightly. However, that is simply not true,” he said.
To get inspired to recreate the logos for the Hamilton schools that contacted LemonGrenade, Long says they researched athletic competitors of the schools to see subject matter, existing logos and do an overall evaluation.
“For example with Garfield, we collected all the griffin logos we could find online. We also collected visual references of the subject matter. If we are drawing bulldogs, we collect real images of the animal from different views so that we have a library of resource images. The entire team then works individually on their concepts until we have our internal critique. As a group, we pick the best concepts and provide constructive criticism to the designers so they can revise the final concepts which will be presented to the client,” he said.
LemonGrenade has five full-time art directors/graphic designers, a part-time web developer and often a college intern. The entire team participates in every project so the client sees a wide variety of options.
Long, who owns the branding and design agency, has taught design and illustration and says he runs his studio like a classroom.
“There are no private offices or cubicles at LemonGrenade, as we all work together in the same area,” he said. “Although we have titles on our business cards, we are all equal with our contributions to our body of work. I have worked at studios in the past where the ‘boss’ was unapproachable and I saw how that negatively affected the creativity and culture of the office. I was not going to be that kind of boss.”
Having spent his entire life in Butler County, Long says he was extremely interested in being part of the renaissance of Hamilton when he opened LemonGrenade’s offices in a downtown building five years ago.
“I love the history and architecture in the downtown area and have always loved the Robinson Schwinn Building,” he said.