It’s a crappy time to be a teacher. The budget cuts. The overcrowded classrooms. The infuriating constraints of No Child Left Behind. To add insult to injury, teachers just aren’t represented terribly well in the media, whether they’re depicted as secular saints with apples on their desks or lazy union-enabled incompetents who hate your children. Could new branding help?

The Brooklyn design studio Hyperakt thinks so and has thusly devised a visual identity scheme that uses the metaphor of “connecting the dots” to portray teachers in a fresh, cheery light.