Christchurch, NZ ·

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Cornerstone Christian School

The cross and the tree were already the school’s. The path between them is mine.

At Hail

cornerstone.ac.nz

A pale tree on a dark blue hill. Three pale bands sweep in from the bottom left, curl round and finish at the foot of the tree. Large swirls fill the sky to the left.
The artwork behind the Academic Pathways section, with the cards and text taken away. Traced as vector for this page from the site’s own file, with one small blemish tidied.

The logo had a cross. The school had a tree it wanted through the whole site. I joined them with a path.

Cornerstone Christian School was established in 1987 and fully integrated into the state system in 1994. It teaches from preschool to Year 13 in Kelvin Grove, Palmerston North, under the motto “Learn, Serve and Grow in God”. Its identity was set before I started: the tree, the blue and the cross. The design had to work inside that.

Three bands

In the logo, three bands curl up to meet the cross. I took those bands, stretched them across a hillside and ended them at the foot of the tree, so the bands that meet the cross in the logo meet the tree here. The swirls in the sky pick up the same curl.

The artwork: three pale bands curl up to the foot of the tree.The school logo’s white cross on navy, with its three bands curling up to the cross at the same spot.
Drag across. The logo’s cross and bands are redrawn for this page, then flipped and scaled so the curl faces the same way.

Where it lives

You meet it first in the School Prospectus card, at the start of the panel that overlaps the home page photo. The navy, the burgundy button and the gold came from the school’s uniform and colours.

The School Prospectus card: the tree and bands on navy, with a burgundy View Prospectus button.
The School Prospectus card on the home page.

Further down it runs large under Academic Pathways, with a pale wash over it. The bands come in from the left and pass under four cards, one for each stage of school, and the tree stands behind them.

The Academic Pathways section: pale bands and swirls on washed blue, the top of the tree showing above four cards for Preschool, Primary, Middle School and Senior School.
Academic Pathways on the live site. The student photo on the Senior School card is replaced with plain navy here.

The path runs through four stages of school. I created a mark for each one.

Four navy and gold marks: a sprout in an open hand, a cross standing in an open book, a compass inside a heart, and a mortarboard above a rising arrow.
Preschool, Primary, Middle and Senior. Redrawn as vector for this page from the site’s own files.

A sprout in an open hand. A cross standing in an open book. A compass inside a heart. A mortarboard above a rising arrow. They share one navy and one gold, and each has to read at 78 pixels wide on its card. I spent two days perfecting them.

All of this went into a new site built in WordPress and Elementor, which replaced a default theme in mid 2025.

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