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EASTWOOD
SCHOOLS

Eastwood Schools is an international school network founded in Kafarshima, Lebanon, in 1973. The network reaches 2,400+ students across 54+ countries via Global Online, with campuses in Lebanon, Switzerland, Iraq, Nigeria, and Angola.

By 2019 the institution's academic ambition and founder vision had outpaced its creative infrastructure — a legacy mark, a non-communicative website, no system, no voice. Head of Design was a department of one. The mandate was full rein. The problem was institutional.

The Blueprint is the thing I needed before I could lead the next phase of the work. It is a thinking document, not a commission. It is the form the question took when I sat down to answer it properly.

A school network is not a brand. It is several brands inside a holding identity, operating in different countries, regulatory contexts, languages, and growth stages — held together by a shared standard. The principle that runs through every decision is that the standard is set centrally and applied locally. Beirut does not look like Montreux. Montreux does not look like Lagos. Each campus has its own brand identity, its own audience, its own market. The network is what makes them legible as one institution.

The job is not making each campus the same. It is making each campus unmistakably itself, inside a system rigorous enough to hold them all.

That principle decides everything. What gets built from scratch. What gets standardized. What gets handed to external agencies with brand guidelines. What gets piloted at one campus before it scales. The tier of involvement is a strategic decision, not a workload one.

Eastwood Beirut, Eastwood Global Online, and Eastwood Montreux — full design ownership. Brand identity systems built end to end. Visual language, tone of voice, design principles. Websites built on Squarespace, custom-coded for team access and operational continuity. Editorial design, social campaigns, email newsletters, academic policies, handbooks, signage, admissions collateral, event materials. The full content stack, on-brand and operationally maintainable.

Eastwood Nova — brand standards, collateral and apparel. The system the campus operates inside.

Eastwood Erbil — brand guidelines. Documented standards external partners apply.

Eastwood Lagos — rebrand and brand guidelines. New positioning, new identity, full guideline document built to govern the post-rebrand expression.

Eastwood Kafarshima — website work for the founding campus.

Eastwood Luanda — pre-launch pitch for the network's eighth school. Brand identity proposal, positioning, and launch strategy delivered before campus opening.

The AI workflow architecture connects Eastwood's existing stack — HubSpot, Typeform, Campaign Monitor, and adjacent tools — into AI-augmented design and operational workflows. Originated as Module 8 of the Parsons AI for Creativity and Leadership coursework. Now live institutional infrastructure. The Eastwood AI Blueprint (April 2026) extends it: a leadership-review document mapping the full digital ecosystem, target architecture, governance model, and ninety-day execution plan.

External agencies execute to the standard set in-house. The standard is the deliverable.

Coherence at scale, across tiers of involvement, without losing local fit. A network operating in Lebanon, Switzerland, Iraq, Nigeria, Angola, and online globally does not hold itself together. The hard problem is not producing the work at any one campus. It is keeping the network visually coherent, digitally functional, and strategically aligned while each campus is at a different growth stage, in a different market, governed by different educational and regulatory frameworks, and operating in different languages.

The answer is architectural. A central standard rigorous enough that external agencies execute against it without drift. A documentation discipline that lets the system survive turnover. A tier model that decides where full design ownership applies and where brand standards or guidelines are the right tool. A technology layer that lets one designer hold a network without becoming the bottleneck.

The work is not the design. The work is the system the design comes out of.

Eastwood Schools is studied by other elite international schools as a reference for how progressive education looks and communicates. Work originated in-house has been adopted at peer institutions. The brand identity is strong enough that incoming external agencies build to it rather than around it. The AI workflow architecture, originated as a Parsons capstone, is now live institutional infrastructure. The Eastwood AI Blueprint is a working leadership document, not a deliverable that closed.

Six years in, the design function that did not exist in 2019 is the standard the institution is held to.

Role: Head of Design. Studio: Haus of Sparrow. Year: 2019 – Present.

Collaborators: Saatchi & Saatchi supplied the original logo sheets, color palette, and two typefaces for Eastwood Beirut. Everything after — the brand system, the voice, the editorial language, and every application across the network — was built in-house.

External agencies execute to that standard.