With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Schusterman Family Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and others, a team of educators and experts sought to build a national movement to increase education equity with free, standards-aligned K-12 education resources and professional development. In need of everything from a name to website design, the start-up education technology nonprofit asked Constructive to help launch this bold initiative and help teachers and students meet higher standards.
When we started working with UnboundEd, the education technology nonprofit didn’t even have a name—so there was a lot to be done! We hit the ground running to create a new brand from whole cloth. Our brand strategy process started with interviews, market research, and workshops to surface strategic insights. We then distilled our findings into strategic positioning that placed the brand at the intersection of education reform and social justice, reflecting the nonprofit’s disruptive approach to helping teachers increase education equity. With the nonprofit’s brand strategy in place, we then crafted a brand messaging platform that articulates the mission, values, and strategy—creating a brand handbook that helps staff and partners embody the brand’s values and express them with clarity and conviction.
If there’s one thing we learned during the naming process, it’s that in the K-12 education space, just about every good idea seems dangerously close to an existing brand! After an exhaustive process to create a disruptive brand with a mission to free educators from the burdens of expensive resources and empower them to focus on what they love to do, UnboundEd was born. Visual identity combines classic “schoolbook” serif type and a modern-era sans-serif, a vibrant color system, and iconography that communicates UnboundEd’s position as a new kind of organization that stands strong with teachers—and for equality in education.
To achieve its goals online, a brand presence was only a small part of the story; UnboundEd needed to provide teachers and school leaders with easy access to its growing library of free, standards-aligned education resources and training material. Through an Agile UX design process, we collaborated with UnboundEd’s team and their technology partner, Learning Tapestry, to create a structured experience that introduces audiences to UnboundEd’s history, mission, and methods while providing educators with easy access to UnboundEd’s content and professional development institutes.
Visual and interaction design for UnboundEd.org extends the brand’s identity design system, both to create an emotional connection with the brand and to provide visual cues that strengthen site usability. A vibrant color palette and photography speak to the K-12 teaching experience, and visually structure content by subject matter and grade level. UnboundEd’s type system then provides strong typographic hierarchies, making it easy to scan pages and read the website’s long-form content.
Teaching to the Common Core can be overwhelming for teachers. UnboundEd helps solve this problem with the most comprehensive online curriculum of sequenced, standards-aligned open education resources in America. To create it, we first conducted extensive interviews and testing with educators to understand their primary frustrations in teaching to the standards. Through rounds of Agile prototyping, we designed a modular way-finding system that serves as the backbone of UnboundEd’s online curriculum. The result makes over 5,000 sequenced K-12 ELA and math lessons, modules, units, primary sources, and texts easily accessible—adding audio and video training that facilitates their implementation in the classroom.
UnboundEd improves educational opportunities for all students by empowering teachers and improving education equity through open access to the largest online curriculum of free, high-quality, standards-aligned resources in America.
To complement their online curriculum, UnboundEd helps teachers raise their own performance by conducting professional development training across America. We created a separate, dedicated website for their Standards Institute, an immersive five-day professional development experience designed to build, improve, and sustain equitable instructional excellence. The website provides educators with everything they need to know about how UnboundEd helps them achieve at the intersection of standards, content, curriculum, and the equitable instructional practices that are essential for closing the opportunity gap caused by systemic bias and racism.
“When UnboundEd partnered with Constructive, we had a strong vision and a passionate team committed to providing standards-aligned materials and learning for educators. What we didn’t have was a brand, a website, or even a name. Their team dove in to solve these challenges with palpable enthusiasm for our mission and great expertise. They helped name our organization, develop the brand, and build a website that lets us reach educators across the country to provide them with the resources and support they need to serve all students.”
Kate Gerson, Managing Partner, UnboundEd
How can we make sure teachers know about us in time?
With the school year fast approaching, UnboundEd wanted to launch a digital marketing campaign to generate excitement in the education community over the summer and make sure that teachers busy prepping their curriculum knew about UnboundEd’s free resources. We created a campaign of bold, clean, illustrated social media ads that stand out with values-aligned hashtags—raising brand awareness, engaging audiences on Facebook and Twitter, and directing educators to UnboundEd’s website.