The brief: St. Edwards Catholic Primary school’s recent new build had created a new spacious school interior with extensive corridors with plenty of ‘white space’. For the very first time the Infants and Juniors could be united on to one site giving cause to celebrate the occasion as part of the schools long and interesting historic journey. Two Thirds Design were commissioned to create a permanent graphical resource to display St. Edward’s story within the areas created by the new build.

The process: We involved the pupils and staff as researchers and used their creative writing, drawings, collections, thoughts and ideas to create the content for the display boards. The information was to be displayed in chronological order, so we weaved three themes throughout each panel. Two school corridors lead to open library areas presenting us with a design opportunity to link the displays to the libraries giving the display greater significance as a school resource. So the top layer to the boards were books through the ages, we suggested the school provided us with a list of book titles with authors used throughout the curriculum. We then asked the pupils from all year groups to provide illustrations for the book covers. The middle layer of information contained the school’s history using, newspaper cuttings; extracts from the school log books as well as photographs. The graphical bottom layer links in that particular point in time to key events in Birmingham’s history.

The end result: We transformed the school corridors and open spaces with a beautiful permanent resource with interspersed interactive spaces for the pupils work. Not just a display but a teacher resource consisting of 6 extremely large panels (1.5 x 2.5 metres each) printed full colour on vinyl and then adhered to the reverse side of acrylic. This made the permanent display practical not only in terms of requiring valuable teacher time needed to constantly update to keep the corridors inspiring but meant it was extremely durable and easy to clean.