About Tyler Wessel

Seeing the mixed signals

I spent the first decade of my career working in events, events that teach you something that's hard to forget: guests often decide how they feel before the program ever starts. The registration experience, communications timing, physical spaces, check-in, the tone of the person who greets them. You can run a flawless program after a bad arrival and still lose the room.

Branding is the same way. Once I entered the creative space, I saw similar patterns emerge in schools and organizations. The website, the viewbook, the campus spaces, communications style, the message that doesn't match what families experience. Yet the diagnosis had already been determined before I had been looped in: the school needed more polished materials.

I designed the project. I did it well. The bigger problem still remained unaddressed.

Dozens of small signals, each one signaling something different to a family. The school really was warm, or rigorous, or creative (feel free to enter your own school's attribute here). But every other signal communicated the opposite feeling.

That happened enough times to stop being a coincidence.

No single person or department was doing something wrong. No single element was specifically broken. Nothing was intentionally dishonest. The signals just didn't align.

And families felt it, whether or not they could name it. They tell themselves their decision is about specific metrics, but research points the other way: choices tend to get made on gut instinct and emotion, and the evidence gets assembled afterward to justify it.

That means that many signals a school never audits are often the ones doing the true influencing, for better or worse.

Better marketing doesn't close that gap. It makes gaps easier to see.

This all reframed how I wanted to partner with schools. In many engagements, the school didn't need a shinier message. It needed to know its core identity and where its promise and the family experience drifted. THAT question has to be answered before anyone writes a word or picks a font.

Design didn't get demoted; it got moved. Expression is supremely important, but it amplifies whatever is already there. If the signals disagree, better design makes the disagreement louder. The diagnosis comes first so the design has something true to amplify.

If you want to know what your school is signaling to its families and students, let's start with a conversation about it.