Making nurseries look friendly at scale
A nursery group is a strange client. Your audience is anxious parents, tired staff and candidates deciding whether to spend their working lives with other people’s toddlers. Every graphic has to be warm, clear and fast to read, usually before someone’s thumb has finished scrolling past it.
I was Creative Designer at Busy Bees Nurseries until 2021, working in a small, agile team across brand, digital and print, business communications, video and photography. This page covers the digital side.
Social media
Most of the work was social graphics, and they had jobs to do. Recruitment posts had to make a stranger want to join a team. Announcements had to be clear at a glance. Safety campaigns had to land with a parent in about two seconds.
The key to all of it was the mascot. A cartoon bee in a hi-vis jacket and a woolly hat can say “please don’t give your under-fives sparklers” without sounding like a lecture.
Banners, thumbnails and the YouTube channel
The same visual language ran through web banners, video thumbnails and the Busy Bees YouTube channel, so that a parent, a candidate or a child watching a story session could tell where they were within a second.
The parent app landing page
I also designed the landing page for the Busy Bees parent app, the place where parents get photos, updates and milestones from their child’s day. It had to explain what the app does in about ten seconds and get a worried parent to the user guide.
The page is live at busybeeschildcare.co.uk/app.
Design: social graphics, banners, video thumbnails and the app landing page.
Brand: keeping the bee mascot and colour palette consistent across everything.
Impact: banners, posters and leaflets for more than 350 nurseries across Europe.