The Deanes School — A lined exercise book built around the school's literacy codes and the "i matter as a learner" ethos

The brief

The Deanes School came to us wanting a single house-style exercise book that could be used across the curriculum — one cover, one set of literacy expectations, one tone of voice — rather than a different generic jotter in every lesson. The book needed to carry the school's identity (the yellow, the leaping-deer "D" crest, the "i matter as a learner" line) and to put the school's own literacy marking codes in front of students every time they opened it, so that the codes a teacher writes in the margin mean the same thing in English as they do in Geography or Science.

What we designed

Working with the school, we built a 68-page A4 book that keeps things deliberately uncluttered — the writing pages are the bulk of the book, with a handful of reference spreads doing the heavy lifting around them.

A yellow cover carrying the school's leaping-deer "D" crest in the top-left and a small title-and-name block on the top-right, with the "i matter as a learner" mark sitting at the foot of the cover — so the book reads as a Deanes book the moment a student picks it up.
A "200 Most Commonly Misspelled Words" spread, titled with a deliberate "comonly → commonly" strikethrough joke so the page teaches the habit it's asking for. The list runs from absence and accommodate through to weird and whether, set in five columns across A4 so a student can scan it without losing their place.
Lined writing pages with a left-hand date margin, ruled to a consistent line height across the book — the same template whether the page is being used for an English essay, a Science write-up or a Humanities source response.
A Feedback/Notes line built into one of the writing pages, so DIRT and teacher comments live inside the book rather than on a separate sticker or sheet.
A grid "Ideas page" for planning, mind-mapping, rough diagrams and working out — useful in Maths and Science but also for any subject that wants brainstorming space that isn't ruled.
A full-page "Our School Literacy Marking Codes" key on the inside back, setting out the five codes the school uses — P for punctuation, SP for spelling, G for grammar, ? for unclear expression, and NP for a new paragraph — with the meaning of each code and what the teacher does in the body of the text (circle the error, underline it, or mark // for a paragraph break). The "i matter as a learner" mark sits underneath the table, tying the codes back to the school's learning ethos.

The finished book

A4 copies were printed in the UK and carbon balanced from print through to delivery.