Salamanca City Central School District
Community pride inspires logo system designed for school district within Seneca Nation of Salamanca, NY.
The Salamanca City Central School District in southern New York is in a unique position. While it’s in the Allegany section of the Seneca Nation of Indians Reservation, where 36% of student enrollment is Native American, it is not formally classified as a Seneca-sponsored school.
This dynamic presented an opportunity for the district’s administration to illustrate this unification within the redesign of the school logo. It was important to represent the school district, its connection to the area’s heritage and culture, and maintain their current athletics branding — the Warriors.
At the recommendation of the architectural firm working to expand the school’s campus, the School District reached out to OtherWisz Creative for help with finding a creative solution to their request.
Services: Logo/Identity Design
The main graphic in Salamanca’s new logo is a significant symbol in Seneca culture — the eagle feather, which is worn in traditional headdresses with a single feather pointed straight up. The feather is cleverly nested within the negative space of a sporty capital “S”, which can be used alone as a monogram or within the full word mark. The school colors of red and gray are used throughout the logo design to align with the athletics department branding.
To build out the visual identity, we specified designs for (1) the primary logo; (2) a secondary “text-only” version without the feather, for legibility in small applications; and (3) a monogram featuring the capital “S”.
Individual lockups were designated for each school in the district, the athletics department, and with Salamanca’s “Home of the Warriors” slogan. We also included a small selection of alternate color variations for use on sports jerseys. All files were provided in multiple formats for high quality print and web usage.
As an addition to the new logo package, the School District had our team digitize and develop the warrior’s profile — based on original hand-drawn artwork by local indigenous artist Carson R. Waterman — into another accompanying brand asset.
While many institutions are rolling back logos that use Native American imagery, the local Seneca community supported and encouraged Salamanca in the decision to continue using the illustration. It was important to the community that the warrior profile didn’t disappear from the new visual identity system, instead continuing to be an important piece of the school’s overall brand.
We finished this project by developing a complete Brand Manual for the client, to identify all the elements of the new brand with standards for proper usage. This will guide staff to apply logos correctly and consistently across all departments, effectively maintaining the Salamanca City Central School District’s new brand in its communications efforts.
