Empowering Minds, Inspiring Hearts: Designing Donor Recognition Through the Eyes of Ventana Students
When Ventana School began planning an expansion to add two new classrooms to its Los Altos campus, the project represented more than additional space. It marked an important moment in the school’s growth and an opportunity for its community to help shape Ventana’s future.
Through its Empowering Minds, Inspiring Hearts Capital Campaign, parents, alumni families, staff, and friends came together to support the expansion. With the campaign successfully reaching its fundraising goal, Ventana School engaged GNU Group to explore an important question: How could the school meaningfully recognize the people who made this next chapter possible while creating something that felt distinctly Ventana?
The resulting program included a capital campaign display, individual donor recognition throughout the campus, a School Board display, and a monument identification sign. Rather than approaching these elements as a collection of traditional donor plaques, our team saw an opportunity to create a recognition system rooted in the character, creativity, and values of the school itself.
Designing Around Ventana’s Values
Color, light, and pattern from Ventana’s stained glass helped inspire the recognition program.
From the beginning, our conversations with Head of School Amanda Stewart and the Ventana team made it clear that the project needed to reflect more than the visual identity of the school. It needed to reflect its ethos. Ventana’s values encourage students to Wonder Constantly, Work Together, Bring Your Whole Self, Appreciate Each Other, Choose Kindness, and Respect Nature. These ideas became an important foundation for our design process.
Ventana’s existing brand gave us a visual vocabulary to build from, including vibrant colors, circular forms, and artistic expression. The campus and its relationship with the natural environment offered another layer of inspiration. Also, Ventana’s church and its beautiful stained glass became an important source of inspiration for creativity. But we wanted the recognition program to go one step further. If the project celebrated the future of Ventana’s students, we felt those students should have a voice in creating it.
Inviting Students Into the Design Process
Working with Ventana’s faculty and leadership, GNU Group invited students to create original drawings that could become part of the recognition displays. Students were given a series of prompts designed to encourage imagination and personal interpretation:
Drawings by Ventana students helped bring their own voices into the design.
- What is your favorite picture in the stained glass of the church?
- What would a flower, butterfly, leaf, tree, or other natural element that represents you look like?
- Draw an object that represents “nature” to you.
As we explored ways to bring Ventana’s values into the design, I kept coming back to the idea of artistic expression. As an illustrator myself, I am always looking for opportunities to incorporate hand-drawn elements into the built environment. For this project, however, I realized the most meaningful artwork would not come from me. It would come from the students.
Working with Ventana’s faculty and leadership, we invited students to create original drawings that could become part of the recognition displays. Their prompts encouraged them to find inspiration in nature, imagine something that represented them personally, or reinterpret imagery found within the stained glass of Ventana’s church.
There was something really special about taking those individual drawings and seeing them become part of a larger visual language. Each illustration retained the personality and perspective of the student who created it, while together they began to tell a story about the Ventana community.
Suddenly, we were not simply designing for the students. We were designing with them. That distinction became one of the most meaningful aspects of the project.
A Display That Rewards Curiosity
The student illustrations became the foundation for the graphics wrapping the vertical structure of the capital campaign display. Moving from warm reds and yellows near the ground through greens, blues, and purples above, the column creates a colorful visual journey. Throughout it, student drawings appear at different heights and on different faces of the structure. There is no single vantage point from which to experience all of the artwork. Instead, visitors are encouraged to take in the display from different perspectives, look closer, and discover details they may not have noticed before.
A leaf, flower, shell, butterfly, or unexpected drawing might reveal itself from another perspective. That sense of discovery felt particularly appropriate for a school whose first stated value is to Wonder Constantly.
At the center of the installation, a circular donor recognition element celebrates the community members who supported the campaign. The form creates a deliberate intersection between two stories: the generosity that made the school’s expansion possible and the creativity of the students who will benefit from it.
Making Recognition Personal
The idea of student expression did not end with the primary capital campaign display.
Each donor plaque pairs recognition with a different student illustration, making every piece feel personal and unique.
That same thinking carried into the individual donor plaques placed throughout the campus. Rather than treating them as standardized markers, we paired the recognition with different student illustrations. This became one of my favorite details of the project. These plaques are relatively small elements, but the drawings give each one its own personality. A donor’s name might sit alongside a student’s drawing of a flower, shell, leaf, or something completely unexpected. For me, those small moments capture what the larger project is about.
The donor recognition celebrates the people who invested in Ventana, while the artwork celebrates the students and experiences that investment supports. These details create a connection between two groups at the heart of the project: the community that invested in Ventana and the students whose experiences that generosity will help shape. The approach was also adapted for the School Board display at a scale appropriate to its setting, creating continuity across the recognition program without requiring every element to look exactly the same.
More Than a Name on a Plaque
Donor recognition serves an important purpose. It acknowledges generosity and preserves the history of the people who helped make a project possible.
But it can do more.
At Ventana School, recognition became an opportunity for storytelling, participation, and placemaking. By incorporating student artwork into the built environment, the displays celebrate not only those who supported the school, but also the curiosity and individuality that their support makes possible.
As a designer, this project reminded me why I love finding opportunities for illustration and storytelling within environmental graphics. A sign can communicate a name or recognize a contribution, but it can also create curiosity, preserve a memory, and give people a sense of ownership in the spaces around them. For GNU Group, the success of the Ventana School project lies in that connection. The finished program is colorful and expressive, but its meaning comes from something deeper: the students of Ventana can look at these displays and see a little bit of themselves reflected back.
And perhaps, if they walk around one more time, they will discover something new.
For more on this project, Click HERE.
Michelle brings an illustrator’s eye to her work at GNU, with a strong sense of composition, detail, and visual storytelling. Her background in both illustration and sign fabrication gives her a unique perspective on how creative ideas take shape and carry through to the finished environment.