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iCivics has grown tremendously since its start in 2009 as an e-learning nonprofit startup founded by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Today, iCivics is used by over 9 million students in classrooms across the country, and the EdTech brand is continuously expanding its offering and ambition.

With an extremely diverse set of audiences—ranging from large donors and policy advocates to teachers, students, administrators, parents and homeschoolers–iCivics’ new web presence and education product needed to effectively attract, guide, and deliver on varying goals across multiple platforms for a new two-brand system.

Ronik's scope encompassed digital properties for both the newly-formed vision brand and the existing education brand—as well as the educational product itself: the iCivics teaching and learning experience.

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Our challenge was to tell an expanded story and speak directly to new types of users without deterring or disorienting iCivics’ established base of teachers and students, who rely on familiarity, ease, and student-friendly web practices for classroom implementation. 

Ronik partnered with BBMG, who led the brand strategy and defined the organization’s new visual identity. The new brand architecture called for a digital presence for the Vision brand to be created from scratch. 

More than this, iCivics’ new website had the demand of elevating the message of its evolved identity and illustrating its deep impact to change hearts and minds and bring more people into the fold of its work with advocacy and legislation. iCivics users found the former brand and website difficult to navigate and comprehend—research confirmed that users not only failed to enjoy the great variety of free resources on offer, but could not see past the online games to the big picture work being done by iCivics for young people, policy, and the nation’s future on a grand scale.

Building on interviews, audience surveys, and brand analysis, Ronik undertook an in-depth research phase to uncover not only essential requirements but opportunities for iCivics to shine in its new space with an expanded mission and mandate.

iCivics’ own research offered not only extensive reporting on site traffic and user behavior, but numerous surveys, interviews, and workshops with educators and administrators, to guide our work and uphold the commitment to listening to their base and prioritizing the needs of the classroom.

The derived key to success was a UX strategy that would funnel users across a new multi-site system for distinct “Vision”, “Education Marketing”, and “Digital Product” entities, utilizing expanded navs, multiple access points between brands, and call-outs catered towards getting each user type where they need to go.

To validate our earlier hypotheses, explore solutions to common pain points, and ensure that we struck the balance between fresh and familiar with the redesign, we interviewed and tested static prototypes with current iCivics teachers during the wireframing phase for feedback on restructured pages and proposed new features. Having an educator-sounding board at this crucial juncture helped steer the final UX and provided a solid foundation for the visual design phase.

User testing with existing teacher-users provided laser-focused insight into the specific needs and frustrations of a busy educator administering a digital curriculum.

On top of the learning- and play-oriented design language, Ronik crafted all modules and templates to be highly responsive and mobile-first, in keeping with the current norms of classroom technology and habits we learned from teachers; use of color, animation, and interactivity all underwent extensive review for maximized accessibility; and we leveraged an expanded visual and graphical lexicon to work in parallel with textual messaging and support iCivics efforts to expand their resources for ESL/ELL users.

The new iCivics Education sitemap and navigation make finding help and inspiration easy. The site provides intuitive pathways to help teachers digest a grand scope of materials beyond the core product: how-to guides for the various resource types, real-life teacher tips, and professional development — all putting knowledge at the teacher’s fingertips, providing an easy in for newbies and constant opportunities to level up.

Web users — students and time-strapped teachers especially — rely heavily on graphical cues and patterns to move quickly through content and reach destinations, so our design system included custom iconography for each resource type, lending the brand identity to a fun and clear wayfinding language of the educational products, and helping teachers and students intuitively identify content types and navigate the massive and growing library of materials.

In the new digital ecosystem driven by this strategy and a flexible design language that stretched across brands, the key message of civic education as indispensable to our nation is front and center as an exhortation with a variety of ways to get involved.

The marketing team now has a suite of content tools befitting a thought leadership brand at its fingertips; teachers and students still find their desired destinations with no time lost; automated and staff curation aid educators’ discovery of new and alternate offerings; and classrooms enjoy the playful interface they’ve come to know and love with an accessible refresh and extensive functional and organizational improvements based on real teacher input.

Ronik helped the iCivics Product and Tech teams to identify opportunities for future enhancements, and have set up a new digital brand language and design system that allows for unrestricted expansion of their product and messaging, creating a platform that will be further enhanced with features and functionality, new cross-tool integrations, and powerful customizations to promote, preserve and improve civic education.


The new languages, libraries, patterns, templates, and practices developed allow iCivics to continue listening to teachers and students and incorporating feedback to make a better educational product that suits the real needs of its diverse users as they evolve over time. 

“The Ronik team was a pleasure to work with. They were articulate, attentive, and friendly, making the design process enjoyable. Their expertise in creating beautiful and user-friendly interfaces was evident in the exceptional foundation of design components they provided, which will undoubtedly serve us well for years to come.”

Director of Research and Product Design, iCivics

Digital platform design for a vision-driven EdTech brand

Creating a seamless digital experience from the ground up for JFK Terminal 4 required more than just a website—it demanded an interconnected ecosystem that could evolve alongside the terminal’s growing operational needs. Ronik took on the challenge of designing and developing not just a customer-facing platform, but an entire digital infrastructure that would serve as the backbone for both marketing and customer service teams. 

Beyond delivering a welcoming and efficient user experience, our approach also laid the groundwork for internal tools that would improve communication, streamline transactions between business teams and vendors, and support ongoing operational efficiency.

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An effective T4 website would need to clearly guide customers while reflecting the terminal’s warm, helpful personality, and vibrant, delightful visual branding. On the operations front, the staff and marketing team needed a flexible tool that could easily be updated for rapidly changing messaging needs, and that would ultimately help them to better do their jobs: serving the T4 customer. 

A thorough Research & Discovery process gave us insights into the pain points and needs of the many types of travelers and terminal staff. These insights guided us from UX and design through copywriting, content creation, and development. 

The new site launch marked the beginning of our ongoing partnership with Terminal 4. We’ve continued to expand the site, monitor analytics, launch digital directory kiosks across the terminal, design and develop a custom Flight Arrivals video wall in the Arrivals hall, create content for the travel- and NYC-focused blog, help the terminal team stay nimble and adapt to changing conditions at the airport, and more. Ronik supports the T4 teams and ensures the digital and in-terminal digital experiences run smoothly, continuing to Guide & Delight.

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Ronik designed and developed touch-screen directory kiosks throughout the terminal which utilize the website’s design language and technology. The content and user experience of the T4 website was adapted to meet the needs of an en-route traveler who is seeking quick info.

The Terminal 4 website was a 2018 “Government & Civil Innovation” Webby Award Honoree.

A digital ecosystem for New York’s largest airport terminal

Ryllace was created for women who want to invest in high-quality pieces with exquisite fit and detail, thoughtfully designed for sizes 14 and up. With luxury, sustainable fabrics and a more sophisticated attitude and style than the existing stable of plus-size brands, Ryllace delivered on its promise to make women feel confident and beautiful—to “Look How You Feel”—and needed a digital experience that echoed this mantra.

Working with branding agency BBMG at the ground floor of the brand strategy and audience immersion process, Ronik got to intimately know our new brand and her muse. The brand strategy and the insights we gathered from our customer experience and competitive research uncovered numerous design and CX opportunities for Ryllace. We aimed to raise the bar, to win over our customer with thoughtful experience details like personalization, clear fit details, representations of many body types, and friendly messaging. 

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As part of the Cornerstone family of brands and digital retailers, Ryllace would share the common ecommerce backend used across the suite  of companies. Our constraints and our opportunity lied in designing within the existing infrastructure and ecommerce team’s workflow and resources—within this framework we created a fresh and brand-driven experience.

Integrated editorial plays a key role in showcasing looks and offering inspiration. Guest editors and influencers give their personal spin on styling and versatility. “Shop the look” helps customers easily put together an outfit and accessorize from head to toe, and product photography featuring models of multiple body types and sizes gives the shopper the inspiration and confidence to make a purchase.

Bringing a beautiful, inventive Ryllace ecommerce experience to life required out-of-the-box thinking inside an already-defined box. We saw the constraints of the parent company's existing infrastructure as creative inspiration, not limitation. The Ronik team flexed our deep ecommerce, UX, art direction, front-end, and technical skills to fully execute a vision of modern, purposeful beauty, from web to social.

Experience design for a fashion brand launch

PGIM is a leader in investment consulting and strategy, delivering high-quality content that informs financial decision-making and demonstrates its commitment to innovation and excellence in the investment management industry.

With deep experience transforming dense, expert-level content into engaging formats, Ronik was tasked with translating PGIM’s financial narratives into compelling interactive experiences that distill complex ideas and visualize data stories—allowing for clear and memorable takeaways on financial strategies and insights on important, timely topics. We ensured the series resonated with its target audience, while equipping the company with a robust update to their design system and a suite of custom graphics.

The launch of the OutFront series marked a bold new strategy for PGIM’s audience engagement, requiring an evolution beyond their existing creative playbook. Ronik expanded the PGIM digital design language to accommodate dynamic, branded storytelling through data visualizations, multimedia reporting, and custom 3D models and animations.

In the initial phases of each installment’s creation, we collaborate closely with Reuters Plus and PGIM stakeholders to identify the most impactful and relevant takeaways of each theme. Topics have included the financial impact of AI, the healthcare revolution, ESG and greenwashing, and the future of cities. 

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As new data and content are processed in real-time, the writing team’s data research and copy is transformed into unique visual layouts featuring interactive maps, animated statistics, data visualizations, custom 2D and 3D graphics, and curated photography and video, thoughtfully designed for seamless desktop and mobile experiences.

Ronik developed the OutFront series entirely on the robust Ceros interactive platform, optimized for a consistent desktop and mobile experience, and prepped for seamless embedding on the PGIM. We implemented custom animation of all charts and graphs, to achieve an elegant build-in as the user scrolls.

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Each launch is further supported by Ronik through the creation of static and animated ad units and promos, a custom-designed printable whitepaper edition, and translations of designs and assets into additional core audience languages, ensuring maximum reach and engagement.

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To ensure the campaign’s longevity and adaptability, we crafted a narrative style that could function as a versatile template and introduced a distinctive “globe” motif as the centerpiece of the OutFront brand. This recurring, evolving hero image provides a memorable encapsulation of each theme.

We expanded the PGIM brand to support new applications by introducing a broader palette, a distinctive photographic style, dynamic data animations, and a custom icon library. 

By launching four unique pieces annually—now numbering over a dozen in total—we leverage a cohesive visual framework and consistent UI while allowing each story to stand out through tailored imagery, data storytelling, and subtle stylistic nuances—ensuring every piece feels fresh yet harmonizes with the overall series.

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The OutFront series, designed and developed by Ronik for PGIM and Reuters Plus, has garnered widespread recognition for its engaging and visually appealing presentation of groundbreaking financial stories and strategies. 

The award-winning interactives distill sophisticated financial concepts while serving as an effective gateway to PGIM’s broader thought leadership catalog, expanding their digital subscriber base and attracting new readers. Celebrated by respected authorities in finance, media, and ESG, the series exemplifies the power of innovative storytelling to elevate brand impact.

“From concept to execution, Ronik has been instrumental in shaping this series into one of PGIM’s most successful digital initiatives. Their innovative thinking, seamless collaboration, and technical skill have elevated every installment, helping us evolve the format and deliver some of PGIM’s most viewed and awarded content.”

Senior Producer, Reuters Plus

2024 Financial Communications Society 29th annual Portfolio Awards — Gold

2023 World Media Awards - Financial Services — Highly Commended

2023 Financial Communications Society 29th annual Portfolio Awards — Gold

2022 Gramercy Institute ESG Marketing & Communications Awards — Winner

2022 Investment Marketing and Innovation Awards (Investment Week) — Shortlist

2022 Financial Communications Society 28th annual Portfolio Awards — Gold

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Transforming financial thought leadership into dynamic storytelling 

The existing platform was outdated, not visually cohesive with the GE digital ecosystem, and lacking in organization. It was not successfully converting users into email subscribers or potential sales leads for their Voluson ultrasound products. Ronik was tasked with reimagining the experience from scratch, in order to improve usability, elevate the design, and ultimately generate more traffic and leads.

Ronik designed and developed a user-friendly experience that features rich imagery and clear navigation. The information architecture was redesigned to put the focus on the Topic taxonomy, helping visitors easily locate content around the themes they are interested in. Overhauling the design with a warm, inviting aesthetic that echoes the GE Women's Health branding, we streamlined the discovery and reading journey with a sleek, intuitive experience.

Ronik and GE Empowered’s engagement has continued over multiple years and projects. In addition to one-off projects, Ronik has provided monthly support services for the GE Empowered site, with ongoing design and development work to keep the site’s infrastructure up-to-date. 

In 2020, Ronik implemented GE Voluson Club’s Because She Needs to Know multimedia campaign into the GE Empowered site as part of a digital amplification strategy. We evolved the site's storytelling capabilities by creating a new branded story page template that is specific to the Campaign and case study format. These new pieces of content were tagged using the global taxonomy, and are now part of a related ecosystem of helpful material. Now featuring over 22 case studies, the site showcases the power of GE’s ultrasound technology and the direct impact it has on patient success, raising brand awareness and serving as a powerful conversion tool for potential customers.  

A knowledge base for women’s healthcare professionals

With manipulated media, misinformation, and “deep fakes” running rampant online, the Reuters News Agency set out to do its part to educate and guide researchers, journalists, reporters, and newsmakers around the globe in making more informed decisions about the media they encounter. 

Reuters needed a digital partner who could readily move between the disciplines needed to launch the full experience quickly. Building on our nine-year collaboration, they turned to Ronik to realize their vision: an accessible, inviting learning platform with a smart back-end that allows for easy updates and expansions to the knowledge base over time. 

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We designed with a modular approach, planning for varied chapters using a common design system of teaching and testing elements. Working with the news agency’s content while in development, our team helped organize and break up the experience, mapping sections and copy in wireframes, identifying common components and interactive question types across chapters.

The visual identity of the experience is defined by stylized, looping videos that introduce each chapter. We created these custom, 3D renders to offer an abstract but meaningful visual representation of each theme. The full-screen chapter intro’s are immersive moments meant to punctuate the experience, draw the user’s attention with visual interest, and give users clear indicators of progress and context. 

The suite of animations contains references to digital media and editing software, and the fuzzy, incoherent, and distorted image effects are stylized metaphors of digital manipulation. They invite you to look closely, look again, and decipher what you are seeing.

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The launched course initially included four languages and featured three distinct chapters with multiple, multimedia-rich sections within each. User behavior is tracked using Twilio’s Segment analytics, allowing for advanced tracking and detailed reporting on how the course is being used.

As a result of the success following the launch of the project’s initial phase, Reuters partnered with Ronik again in 2020 to implement an additional 10 languages to further expand its reach and assist newsrooms across the world.

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Identifying and Tackling Manipulated Media was released to critical acclaim, winning a Webby Award in the Websites: News & Politics category at the 2020 Webby Awards.

Identifying and Tackling Manipulated Media

Providing clarity in an age of misinformation with Reuters

ronik

We create digital experiences that really slap.

iCivics

Digital platform design for a vision-driven EdTech brand

JFK Terminal 4

A digital ecosystem for New York’s largest airport terminal

Ryllace

Experience design for a fashion brand launch

PGIM OutFront Series

Transforming financial thought leadership into dynamic storytelling

GE Empowered Women’s Health

A knowledge base for women’s healthcare professionals

Identifying and Tackling Manipulated Media

Providing clarity in an age of misinformation with Reuters