National Education Nature Park

A brand with a long name and an even bigger job to do

The National Education Nature Park is a partnership project led by the Natural History Museum and funded by the Department for Education, working alongside the Royal Horticultural Society, the Royal Society, the Royal Geographical Society, Learning through Landscapes, Manchester Metropolitan University and other supporting partners. The ambition was significant: a network of outdoor spaces in schools, nurseries and colleges across England, empowering young people to map, monitor and enhance their learning sites for nature.

The brief carried real constraints. The identity needed to work for early years children through to college students, without favouring one age group over another. It needed to sit comfortably alongside the logos of seven partner organisations across a huge range of documents and formats. It needed to meet WCAG 2.1 AA+ accessibility standards throughout. And it needed to somehow make a long, formal programme name feel warm, simple and usable on a small badge, a tiny digital button, or a child’s certificate.

We designed a brand system built around a textured paper-cut illustration style, with varying degrees of detail corresponding to different age groups, from playful and simple for early years through to more intricate and sophisticated for older students. The system was built to be expanded easily over time, with illustrations producible in common creative software so the museum’s own team and partner organisations could create new assets without needing to come back to us for every piece of work. The Climate Action Awards scheme was developed as a flexible sub-brand within the main identity, designed from the outset to support multiple award levels still being developed at the time.

From launch to 9,500 schools, and counting

We delivered a thorough set of guidelines governing colour, typography and illustration use, designed for consistency whether assets were created by the museum’s internal team, partner organisations, external agencies, or teachers and school staff using the toolkit directly. The brand launched in 2023 and was applied across the new Nature Park website, traditional and digital advertising, e-newsletters, social media and infographics from day one.

Three years on, we remain the Natural History Museum’s ongoing design partner for the programme. We have produced and refined activity templates in multiple formats, updated brand guidelines as the programme has evolved, delivered new logo lockups and variations as partnership needs have changed, and supported the Schools Forum and wider programme team with design requests as they arise. What began as a single identity project has become a long-term, hands-on relationship and the programme itself has grown to become one of the largest school engagement initiatives in the country, with more than 9,500 schools now part of the network.