Walking alongside Madalah
A brand as real as the
work.
Madalah supports First Nations students through one of the most significant journeys of their lives. Their brand needed to reflect that – not borrowed stories, not decorative imagery, but a living identity rooted in real lived experience.
Client
Madalah Limited
Sector
Not For Profit/Education
Services delivered
Market
Perth & Western Australia
The brief
More than a
scholarship provider. A lot more.
Madalah came to Sixteen by Nine with a clear challenge: the organisation had outgrown how it was being seen. Despite delivering a model of wraparound support — cultural mentoring, pastoral care, academic guidance, career transition, family connection — that no competitor in Western Australia can authentically replicate, Madalah was still being perceived by too many stakeholders as simply another scholarship provider.
The existing brand identity hadn't caught up with the reality of what Madalah actually does. It leaned on a borrowed story — the Starfish Parable — that had no authentic connection to the organisation, its people, or the communities it serves. The visual identity felt generic. The language felt templated. Neither reflected the genuine, ground-level relationships at the heart of everything Madalah does.
The brief was to change that. To build a brand as real as the work.
The process
One day.
Six strategic domains.
Sixteen by Nine's Brand Master Workshop condenses what can be a months-long discovery process into a single, structured day. Working directly with Madalah's leadership team, we moved through six strategic domains: brand substance, brand position, brand expression, and the foundations for identity, voice, and message.
The workshop is designed to surface what an organisation already knows about itself — the convictions it acts on but hasn't articulated, the differentiation it demonstrates but hasn't named. For Madalah, the material was rich. The job was to bring it into focus.
Trust the process
The room went
quiet.
The workshop started with a constraint. Before we began, the board had made one thing clear: the logo was off limits. The Starfish Parable — a borrowed metaphor about throwing a starfish back into the ocean — had been part of Madalah's identity for years. It wasn't going anywhere. That was the position walking in.
We didn't argue against it. We didn't put a counter-proposal on the table. We ran the process.
By the brand expression phase, one theme had surfaced and resurfaced across every single conversation: authenticity. Genuine connection. Being seen as real, trustworthy partners — not a transactional service. That word, authentic, kept coming back unprompted.
At that point, the question almost asked itself: "If someone meets you for the first time and asks what your logo means — and you tell them you borrowed a story about a starfish from someone else — how does that sit alongside the authentic brand you've just described?"
The room went quiet. Not because anyone was put on the spot. Because everyone in it arrived at the same place at the same time. The logo wasn't the problem. The borrowed story underneath it was. And they'd found that themselves.
That's what a structured process does. It doesn't push clients toward a conclusion. It creates the conditions for them to see their own truth clearly — and then act on it.
The transition
From a borrowed story
to an owned one.
The Starfish Parable — a borrowed metaphor with no authentic connection to Madalah's people or story.
Cade Wheelock's artwork — lived experience, expressed in Cade's own visual language. Entirely Madalah's own.
The identity
Cade's artwork.
Cade's story.
The most significant creative decision in the engagement had nothing to do with typefaces or colour theory. It was recognising that the visual heart of the new Madalah identity already existed.
Cade Wheelock is a Madalah alumnus who now works within the organisation. His artwork — a circular form built from imagery of connection, support, and shared journeys — became the foundation of the new visual identity. Not as a decorative element. Not as an acknowledgement of First Nations culture at arm's length. As the actual logo. The actual brand.
The decision matters because of what it isn't. It isn't stock imagery. It isn't a generic dot painting applied as wallpaper. It isn't an outside designer's interpretation of what Aboriginal art should look like. It is the work of someone who lived the Madalah journey, who now works alongside students living that same journey, expressed in his own visual language. The brand owns that story in a way that no competitor can replicate — because no one else has Cade.
Madalah Brand Master Guide
The full logo asset pack — social, web, favicon, and email signature variants — was produced at 300dpi with colour-verified outputs. Every asset anchors back to the same source: Cade's artwork, built into the brand's core.
The brand position
Walking alongside.
The positioning work surfaced a simple but powerful distinction. Other scholarship providers ask: Can we fund this student's education? Madalah asks a fundamentally different question.
The financial support is essential, but it's the entry point. What happens after a student receives a scholarship — whether they survive or thrive — is where Madalah's model becomes transformational. This became the strategic spine of the entire brand.
Madalah's competitive advantage isn't a program or a feature. It's structural. A First Nations majority-led organisation. Staff who are alumni. Wraparound support that continues beyond school hours, beyond school terms, and beyond the formal program period. Cultural safety that's not a policy but a practice.
These aren't things a competitor can replicate by writing a brief and hiring an agency. They emerge from who Madalah is and who it employs. That's the brand. The identity system, the messaging pillars, the voice and tone — all of it exists to make that truth visible and legible to every audience Madalah needs to reach.
Deliverables
What the engagement
produced.
The Madalah engagement ran across three integrated phases: brand strategy, identity development, and marketing planning. What follows is a summary of the core deliverables produced across each phase.
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