Brand Entrance
After Durham Academy’s first brand refresh in 27 years, one thing is certain: Never has its visual identity so closely matched its visible mission.
By Dylan Howlett, Writer & Content Strategist
Halloween was weeks away. It would be Josh’s last as a student in the Lower School, and he hatched a plan to make it memorable. He wanted an inflatable costume. His parents, Jacob and Celeste, set a budget of $15, which prompted a cost-conscious Josh to browse his options on Amazon. There he found it: a 5-foot polyester likeness of a Dachshund with its tongue extended and a pair of human legs dangling from its upper spine, all the better to create the illusion of a fourth grader riding atop its back. It was on sale for $20. Josh used the earnings from his regular allowance for household chores to cover the $5 shortfall. But he felt something was missing. He cut a piece of cardboard into the shape of a dog bone, covered it with a piece of white paper and draped it around the inflatable dog’s collar. The makeshift tag needed only a name. Josh found a green marker and wrote in neat block letters the moniker that would fulfill his unmistakable vision: BLADE.
The morning of Halloween came. Josh clambered out of his family’s car after a 20-minute ride from Hillsborough and stuck his legs through the allotted holes of the Dachshund’s front legs. He and his sister, Carly, walked to their respective fourth grade classrooms on the second floor of the Lower School. Soon, 120 third graders and fourth graders would line the hall in a costumed tunnel, wizards and witches and princesses and superheroes among them, and make a commotion so deafening that this annual Halloween procession could have rivaled a sold-out stadium concert in its fervor and volume. They waited for Josh’s muse to pad up the 23 concrete steps as they crammed the green-tiled landing, only 18 feet at its widest and 11 feet at its tallest, ideal for a rapturous cacophony. They didn’t wait to chant: Blade! Blade! BLADE! BLADE!
Their calls became more desperate, then raucous, until Blade — an upright, 6-feet-tall Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and the most playful expression of Durham Academy’s first institutional brand refresh in 27 years — crested the final step. Blade was festooned in a chef’s outfit that featured a towering white hat and a matching apron that read LET BLADE COOK. The din reached a crescendo. The third graders and fourth graders yelled and stretched their arms toward Blade as they caught sight of the dog’s glow-green eyes and fuzzy brown ears, and the pronounced biceps that masked two Cavalier-style swords affixed to a shield on Blade’s back.
Josh poked his way through the throng of shouting revelers. That’s when Blade saw him. The mascot pointed to Josh with an unmistakable sense of ebullient gratitude, and the real Blade and Josh’s Blade — the first known Halloween tribute to DA’s first mascot — exchanged high-fives.
“I think,” Josh said, his lips curling into an involuntary smile, “Blade is a really fun mascot.”
DA found itself at a visual crossroads. Its logo was familiar and, in some corners of the community, beloved. But several decades had passed, the school and its priorities had evolved, and the logo no longer felt like a current, modern reflection of DA’s values.
It was 1998. Some 65 years before, when DA was founded as Calvert Method School, the school borrowed its first logo from the Baltimore-based Calvert School, on which the Durham school had based its teaching philosophy. That first logo — the silhouette of a young boy’s face with the tagline “Foundation for a Lifetime” — endured for 30 years. In 1963, Marian Fitz-Simmons, a Calvert Method School educator and early DA teacher, designed the “Four Flames” emblem. The symbolic icon contained an Anglo-Saxon “D” and “A” from which four flames of learning emanated: knowledge, perception, creativity and responsibility. Its messaging soon outpaced its visual clarity. Don North, then DA’s head of school, and Greg Gephart, the school’s admissions director, began broaching the idea of a change in 1988 after describing the logo as “baffling.” Community members likened its shape to an apple, an owl, a scarecrow, even a pumpkin. They found it mysterious and exclusionary, with an implicit and inhospitable message to the broader community: You have to be a member of the club to know what this means. By 1998, the school’s External Relations Committee formally affirmed DA’s need for a new logo.
It turned to an alumnus for a solution. Alex Isley ’80 had, by then, founded his own design firm and compiled an eclectic list of clients that included Giorgio Armani, Nickelodeon and Reebok. When he heard his alma mater wanted to adopt a more mission-aligned logo, Isley said he initially tried to talk DA out of it: He had a fondness for the Four Flames. “People don’t like what they like,” Isley said in a Zoom interview this April. “They like what they know.”
He did have some certainty about the design process after years in the industry: A logo project, he explained to DA’s five-member logo committee, should address a problem with specific goals to reach. It must work well in a variety of applications, including merchandising. “I wanted to create something that would look good on a baseball cap,” he said. And it must answer a most elemental question: What should people think of Durham Academy when they see the logo? So was born the interlocking DA, a striking symbol of academic prestige and achievement.
Isley sees a brand as a promise of an experience. For nearly three decades, the interlocking DA communicated a peerless academic institution staffed by extraordinary teachers who readied legions of moral, happy and productive graduates for enrollment at the nation’s best colleges and universities. The symbolism hadn’t changed by the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But DA had. In 2020 and 2021, the school launched and refined its Strategic Vision, committing to bold goals that would prepare students for life, meet the needs of all learners and embrace innovation, all anchored by an unshakable foundation of diversity, equity and engagement. The school’s logo started to feel more and more like an anachronism. It didn’t represent every pocket of the Durham Academy student experience. It also felt more inflexible. “There’s only so much you can do,” Director of Athletics Andy Pogach said, “with the ‘D’ and the ‘A.’” That particular limitation inspired a pair of Athletics-specific add-ons: a crossed-swords logo in 2015 (also designed by Isley) and a script Cavaliers wordmark in 2018 (designed by Sarah Tart, then DA’s brand and design manager). The marketing and communications team began fielding a mounting number of requests from across the school community to modify, or even reinvent, the interlocking DA to fit the specific needs of classes, clubs or extracurriculars. There was also the thorny issue of shoehorning a logo from the late ’90s into the smaller, digital iconography of the social media age.
Then there was the matter of the Cavalier mascot. Its etymology remains unknown. The Office of Marketing and Communications asked several members from the school’s original graduating classes and Anne McNamara, DA’s archivist and a former Upper School history teacher, about the Cav’s origin story. None could recall one. Isley said he remembers a strand of conversation from 1998 in which the logo committee floated the idea of replacing the human representation of a sword-wielding, swashbuckling cavalier with a cavalier spaniel. The committee decided against it, and the human Cavalier endured, with a logo largely borrowed and inconsistent in design, with a rotation of Lower and Middle School students eventually playing the role of the DA Cavalier at pep rallies and basketball games beginning in the 2010s. But the personification of the DA mascot was not necessarily owned or driven by the institution itself, an issue that made its way to Leslie Traba, DA’s director of marketing and communications since 2014. “It was more about addressing apathy about it,” she said, “which, in a way, is almost just as dangerous for a school that’s almost 100 years old.”
So as DA emerged from the pandemic in a position of unquestioned strength, and armed with its clearest articulation yet of the school’s values and mission, it began to confront the same realization Isley made in 1998: There was no better time to revisit the school’s visual identity.
“I was waiting,” Traba said in April, “for all of the stars to align.”
Before she was a DA trustee, or the chair of the DA Marketing and Communications Committee, or the brand strategist who would help steer DA through its first brand reinvention in 27 years, Ashley Yetman was a prospective Durham Academy parent. Yetman and her husband, Lyle, moved to Durham from the Bay Area in 2016, and they needed to find a preschool for their son, Finn. Yetman took a tour with Victoria Muradi, then DA’s director of admissions and now the school’s director of strategic initiatives. She was struck by the quality of conversations between teachers and students, a dynamic that felt “elevated,” she said. She adored the intentional design of classrooms and meeting spaces. She felt moved by DA’s “Moral, Happy, Productive” mission, so much so that she would spend the coming days watching testimonials from students and families on the school website. It shattered her notion of the traditional independent school. “From an experiential standpoint,” Yetman said, “it’s vastly different than I thought.”
By the fall of 2023, both of Yetman’s children, Finn and Bixby, had enrolled at DA, and she had been elevated to co-CEO and director of brand strategy at Baldwin&, a design firm in Raleigh. In her capacity as a Marketing and Communications Committee member, she had become actively involved in the 2023 redesign of DA’s website. “Once you see it,” Yetman said, “it’s hard to unsee the rest of the branding ecosystem. I philosophically believe it’s all connected. It’s of a piece. It’s part of the experience.” Yetman conducted a competitive analysis and sat in on several listening sessions. Soon it became clear that DA had a chance to stand out — with its Strategic Vision, its variety of offerings within the student experience, its devotion to nurturing lifelong learners — in a way that didn’t show up in its brand identity. “Durham Academy has always been great at articulating mission and vision,” said DA parent and fellow committee member Vickie Segar, co-founder of Article 41, a talent management and social training agency for student-athletes, and founder of Village Marketing, an influencer agency. “But design is the other side of the brain that I think is often lost with academic institutions.”
The same theme would resurface the following year, when Yetman and Traba facilitated the first of 14 unique listening sessions related to the DA brand across the full spectrum of school constituencies: enrollment management, philanthropy, athletics, alumni, current students, faculty, leadership, trustees. “Intuitively, people felt like their lived experience inside of DA was mismatched to the external picture that DA was presenting,” Yetman said.
And so she sought a match. With the help of Jen Matthews, the director of design at Baldwin&, and with regular input from Victoria Price, DA’s creative services manager, as well as the rest of the DA marketing and communications team, Yetman and Traba oversaw a nearly yearlong process to imagine a brand that mirrored the ethos of DA. “Why wouldn’t we be intentional,” Yetman said, “about making sure that our visual, and tonal, and even mascot experience feels a part of the strategic vision?” Baldwin&, meanwhile, felt like the ideal partner for DA, and not just because of Yetman’s intimate familiarity with the community: The firm almost exclusively represents mission-driven companies, and DA became its first school-based client. “I really admire them because they like to represent organizations that have strong beliefs and say them out loud,” Traba said.
The feedback that emerged from the dozen-plus listening sessions was near-universal. Green and white felt sacred as primary colors. The “Cavalier” name felt non-negotiable in its preservation, though the visual manifestation of the mascot did not. A sense of shared identity — across divisions, across the school — felt elusive. Middle Schoolers and Upper Schoolers who provided their thoughts had a tough time thinking of any experience or tradition that served as a throughline in their potential 14-year arc as a DA student. They also couldn’t point to any physical markers that demonstrated their school pride. Middle Schoolers, in particular, decried the largely vacant walls of the Gateway Center. Yetman didn’t hear any conviction around what it meant to be a Cavalier, or what the Cavalier signified. “Sometimes,” Yetman said, “the absence of something is just as much of a finding as being able to identify something specific.”
That included the question of a mascot, and how it fit into a DA that is as accessible and diverse and playful as it has ever been. Traba and her team considered splitting the two rebrands — the institution and the mascot — across two different school years. They decided they were better off reinventing both at the same time. “The stories are interwoven,” Traba said, “and the decisions we’re going to make are from the same value-infused perspective.” It was, in many ways, the only perspective to adopt when trying to find a new mascot that would serve 1,267 current students and more than 4,200 alumni. “The biggest challenge,” Segar said, “was the amount of objectives DA had to meet: having a mascot that spanned from pre-k all the way to 12th grade, having to try to stay true to something old while refreshing into something new.”
The rebrand ultimately landed in that very vicinity: a stable of familiar elements made more nimble, and a system that conveyed a unified school while making way for individual pride. There’s the Torch, an academic-specific mark with three flames that represent DA’s commitment to preparing students for Moral, Happy, Productive lives.
“You’ll face moments when external guidance — your school, your teachers — is not around. The clear path isn’t visible anymore. That’s when the torch matters. That’s when you need the light you carry with you. That light is yours. It’s the moral compass we’ve worked to build in you. It’s the resilience and judgment and integrity that will let you navigate when you can’t see anything but the immediate ground in front of you.”
Lanis Wilson, Upper School Director | 2026 Commencement Remarks
There’s a modernized DA monogram that preserves the school’s most inimitable shorthand. There’s a refreshed crossed-swords logo for athletics. There are individualized emblems for the Speech & Debate program, the DARC SIDE robotics team and Durham Academy Summer.
And then there’s Blade, the new embodiment of the Cavalier in the form of a determined-looking Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. It can also adopt a fiercer stare, as it does in the DARC SIDE logo, with glow-green eyes. Puppy Blade, meanwhile, represents Blade at a younger age, depicted with softer eyes and a mischievously protruding tongue.
Funding for the entire process — strategy, design work, rollout — has come from existing marketing budgets. Changes have been, and will continue to be, gradual, from campus signage to new athletics uniforms. The broader DA community, including families and alumni, got its first glimpse Aug. 12, 2025, in an email detailing the new brand ecosystem, along with a launch video directed by DA videographer Jesse Paddock. In an August faculty meeting and a series of division-wide assemblies at the start of the 2025–2026 school year, faculty members and students would see these icons for the first time and go home with them, too, in the form of goodie bags filled with stickers, magnets and bookmarks.
Months before, a small group of Middle School students gathered with Traba and Yetman for a preview of the new brand. A trio of girls sat together at the back of the Middle School Vista Room, and they contemplated the first half of the discussion in respectful silence. But when Yetman and Traba advanced their presentation to a slide featuring Blade, the girls unleashed a coordinated, and voluble, gasp.
“YES!” they cried in unison. “We’ve been waiting for this!”
On a Friday in October, Blade trotted into public life at DA. The first students to see Blade were kindergartners, who had gathered on the DA softball field to celebrate Green and White Day. They summoned Blade by chanting the mascot’s name. Some students huddled behind adults when Blade approached — it was, after all, their first time seeing a rather muscular, two-legged dog — but most swarmed and clung to Blade’s legs, arms, even tail. An emotional connection to their mascot was born. “You develop your love for something as a child,” said Segar, referring to the creation of Blade. “I think that if you were to make a choice, you had to start with the youngest kid.”
And those youngest kids had questions — dozens of them — for Blade. In January, Dr. Michelle Rosen, the Preschool and Lower School librarian, set up a mailbox at the back of the library to allow students to write to Blade. Within two months, more than 130 letters had appeared. Blade replies to every single one. Blade the Cavalier doesn’t make any house visits, although parents have already inquired about availability for children’s birthday parties. Kelly Jernigan, manager of the DA school store, has had to reorder items featuring Puppy Blade — plushies, hoodies, T-shirts — at least twice, proof of its appeal far beyond Preschoolers and Lower Schoolers. Sales of new merchandise during Open House events in August nearly doubled the store’s daily average revenue, and its sales at the annual Turkey Trot 5K and Fun Run saw a 55% jump from 2024. Yetman was at a JV baseball game this spring when she looked over and saw a student dressed head to toe in new gear. “It creates a certain amount of cohesion that didn’t exist before,” said Jake Baldridge, a DA parent, Marketing and Communications Committee member and founder and strategist at Nacho Industries, a Durham-based market research and brand strategy firm. “Its long-term impacts will be subtle but real.”
The newest suite has given athletics teams a distinctive identity from the school’s academic mark — and added flexibility and freedom, both in iconography and colors. “There’s something for everybody,” Pogach said, “and there’s something for every team.” There is, too, for every type of Cav. “This is more visible to remind them that we can be all of these things,” said Middle School Director Jason Mundy. “We can be great athletes. We can be fun-loving folks. But we’re also an academic powerhouse.”
It has already served as a reminder, too, of connection and togetherness. Mundy is, as Middle School director, all too aware of his division’s isolation from DA’s Ridge Road campus. He feels a little less alone when he sees the Torch logo emblazoned on glass doors, or the gargantuan Blade decal in the Gateway lobby. “Those are reminders for our students that we’re part of a whole,” he said.
Lower School Director Carolyn Ronco has a dog-themed planter on the windowsill of her office. It was a gift from a first grader, Aubrey, who told Ronco the clay canine face on the front of the planter reminded her of Blade. Ronco has seen a steady stream of Lower Schoolers sporting Puppy Blade shirts at morning drop-off. None of this, she says, is inseparable from DA’s mission. She points to research that has found a strong correlation between a student’s sense of belonging and their success — academic, social, emotional — at school. Blade is merely one more thing they have in common. “It gives them a point of connection,” she said.
Preschool Director Carolyn Howes feels much the same. The younger sibling of one current DA student will join the student body in the fall, she says, and the child already has their very own Blade plushie. During an April appearance at DA Day at the Durham Bulls, a newly admitted Preschool family approached Blade in the concourse to make introductions. “This is your new mascot, buddy! This is Blade!” the father exclaimed, and then quickly leaned in for a high five.
“It’s unifying,” Howes said of the new brand. “It’s helping us all be DA. We can all get excited for Blade. We’re all Cavs.”
On Halloween morning, Josh and Blade met once more in front of the Lower School. They posed for a photo, with Blade wrapping an arm around Josh’s shoulder and giving a thumbs up. They bade farewell, and Josh bounded down the sidewalk to join the traditional Lower School Halloween parade that snakes through the grounds of the Upper School. It didn’t take long for a particular costume to stand out. “Oh, look!” several Upper Schoolers shouted as they pointed at Josh. “It’s Blade!” One student tossed Josh a bag of Peanut M&Ms out of admiration.
Josh later received an official Blade fabric patch from the marketing and communications team to commemorate his costume. He keeps it on display in his bedroom. “If you see Blade,” Josh says on a Monday morning in April as he sits on a bench by the playground, “you want to basically just try your hardest.” He considers, for a moment, whether Blade represents something more. He catches himself as he’s about to say “Moral, Happy, Productive.” “But that’s the Torch,” Josh says, pantomiming the tips of the three flames across his fingers. He pauses. “I would say Blade is definitely a part of representing that.”
But there’s more. “I think [Blade] also represents activity,” Josh says. In a few minutes, he’ll return to Jean Coene’s fourth grade Comets class — a math lesson and word study await. He glances now toward the playground as students run to and fro during recess on this crisp spring day. “You should at least try to move,” Josh says of Blade’s inspiration. “You shouldn’t complain, because the more you do it, the better you will get.”
He looks out once more at his peers, the very embodiment of their new mascot’s tireless spirit and their school’s fearless dedication as DA leaps into its 93rd year with a visual identity equal to its academic and social-emotional might.
“I think,” Josh says, “you should just keep trying to grow.”