Branding # Character Design # Print Design
Safe & Smart is the online safety programme of Every Child Online, a Basildon charity. It teaches children, teens and the adults around them how to stay safe online. We gave it one brand that reaches all three, with a wordmark, three characters called Pico, Moxo and Luno, a children's storybook and print for schools and events.
Every Child Online refurbishes donated laptops, tablets and phones for children who don't have a device of their own. Its online safety programme, Safe & Smart, runs on a grant the charity received in January 2025. In April 2025 the Safe & Smart team came to us for a brand. They had a mission, to teach online safety to children, teens and adults, and nothing yet to carry it.
Three audiences made it hard. Children aged 5 to 11 needed characters and stories to learn from. Teenagers had to find it calm and approachable, something they'd want to be part of. Parents needed to see how real the risks are, and what to teach their children about them. One brand had to reach all of them without splitting into three.
There were rules from the start. Every Child Online had to stay prominent, with its own logo never changed. Every scenario had to come from a real online harm. Each stage went to the charity's steering group and then its trustees for sign-off, and the funder wanted to see work through the summer of 2025.
Samantha designed the brand and started with three moodboards. On a call on 2 May 2025 we recommended a blend of the second and third, and the charity agreed. The wordmark sets safe & smart in lower case on two lines, and it keeps the characters out of the main mark, so it works on material for parents as well as for children. The logos and characters were signed off on 20 June 2025.
Samantha designed three original animal characters, Pico, Moxo and Luno, and each one stands for one of the three audiences. None of them has a stated gender, so any child can see themselves in them, and their colours tie back to Every Child Online without copying it. Pico has an emotion pack of at least 14 expressions, a library that comics and posters can be built from without drawing every scene from scratch.
Samantha kept one brand and used colour and type effects to change how it speaks to each reader, to suit their age and the tone of the copy. Children's material leans on the characters and on storytelling. For teens the brand stays light and energetic, so Safe & Smart feels more like a movement and a helping hand than something to fear. Adult material goes darker, with orange and black, to show parents the risks are real. The posters follow the same split: character versions for primary schools and harder-hitting ones for secondary.
The youngest readers got a book of their own. Pico's Digital Adventures is a 54-page A4 storybook of 11 stories in four sections, from Game Safe to Staying In Control, with mini games between the stories to keep it fun. We designed its front and back covers and a title page for every story, and each title page works twice more: as the cover of a standalone comic flyer and as a header on the children's web pages. Every villain in the book comes from a real online harm, which is why ideas like Pixel Town were dropped. A child who meets a cartoon villain won't spot the real thing. One of the charity's trustees checked the text. The book went to the charity as a digital flipbook in March 2026, and as a print-ready file in August.
The print is made to go into schools and out to events. We designed comic strip flyers for each topic, with versions for the web and for events, and flyers for adults, teens and children, including A5 double-sided ones for parents. There are also activity sheets, a word search, a quiz, a sticker pack and a Learner's Passport for children. All of it went to the charity as print-ready files. The same brand runs through the Safe & Smart section of the charity's website, which we built in Webflow.
Safe & Smart now goes between schools and events teaching online safety, under the brand we made for it.
This project was a pleasure to work on. I learned a lot about the dangers online and designed with each of the audiences in mind, talking to my own family and friends about their experiences to gain a deeper understanding of how to go about it. After months of revisions and work, we now have something for Safe and Smart that's ready to help them make an impact.
Samantha Coltart, Lead Designer, Cold
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