Introducing our Alternative Provision for schools project for Spring 2025 – Olly’s Work.
We worked with Amanda Stephens and her team to create branding and assets to support her in the campaigning and awareness raising around issues of youth violence and knife crime that they do.
Through talking with Amanda and hearing her story, we came up with 4 key brand values – Joy, Life, Potential and Community.
We used these as a basis for our approach to the project, and tried to incorporate these values into our logo and designs.
We drew a number of different ideas, some revolving around the letter O or W, others revolving around hearts or Olly’s name. We struck gold with an idea to use the Olly letters to create a smiling face. Amanda’s stories of Olly as such a fun lad and a joker really helped this idea come together.
To couple with the handwritten style, we picked a modern bold chunky typeface for the main brand headings.
With a logo design that was bold and cheeky, we still wanted to include hearts somewhere in the designs. The community have been so supportive of the family in the wake of Olly’s tragic loss, and we wanted to include this somehow.
So we proceeded to gain a large number of hearts from local young people – at an event we attended, from the AP group themselves, and from other young people involved with Starting Point.
We took all the hand-drawn hearts we had collected, and digitised them, and they now make up the background to the various outputs we created – business cards, pull-up banners, powerpoint and web page – so no matter where Amanda and the team are talking or presenting about Olly and his story, they are being backed up by the love of the community of Reading behind them.
“We cannot thank Simon from Starting Point enough, and the young people who have created us an Olly’s Work logo, leaflet, business cards, pull up banners, slide deck, QR code, web pages and wristbands.
Their creativity and design have allowed us a very personalised brand design and marketing for our work in the future. Having this help has given us the confidence to present in Reading secondary schools and start to build our own charity for the future. I do believe without this support and guidance we would not be where we are today.
The young people involved, by listening to what we hoped Olly’s Work would be, pulled out ideas that we hadn’t realised were fundamental to Ollys Work: your life matters, your potential is limitless, your joy is possible when we stand together.
Thank you so much.”
Amanda & Stuart Stephens
