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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.

Ronik partnered with BBMG, who led the brand strategy and defined the organization’s new brand strategy and visual identity. 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. 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

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Digital platform design for a vision-driven EdTech brand

Terminal 4 is the only privately-owned terminal in New York’s JFK Airport. After undergoing a fresh, modern rebranding, T4 tasked Ronik with envisioning a new digital experience to meet the needs of their many growing audience groups. We created a new website from the ground up to reflect the T4’s mission to “Guide & Delight.”

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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 video wall in the Arrivals hall, create content for the travel- and NYC-focused blog, and more. Ronik supports the T4 teams and ensures the digital and in-terminal digital experiences run smoothly, continuing to Guide & Delight.

Ronik designed and implemented touch-screen directory kiosks throughout the terminal. The content and UX of the T4 website was adapted to meet the needs of an en-route traveler. 

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A digital ecosystem for New York’s largest airport terminal

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

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

In the business for over 27 years, the company has amassed a wide range of clients, from retail giants such as Home Depot and Walmart, to prestigious real estate developments like Industry City and Chelsea Market, as well as dominant players in rapidly growing industries such as Cannabis.

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The PR firm came to Ronik with an outdated website that didn’t reflect the Marino of today. It felt overly corporate and stood at odds with the organization’s true identity. It needed an overhaul from the ground up, including new messaging, new organization, a new visual style, and a new technology stack.

We identified the needs to clearly highlight the firm’s key service areas, to better tell the client stories that represent these capabilities, to show off the passion and soul of a company who always goes the extra mile, and to craft a clean and sophisticated visual direction for the brand.

As their long-term digital partner, Ronik had a solid understanding of the company’s services, brand, and ethos, and was well-equipped to give its web experience a new visual identity in line with those offerings. Grounding our strategy was an in-depth research phase that had us speaking with staff at every level of the company. This positioned us to craft the narrative from the inside, infusing every decision with the DNA of the company and its people.

Custom content modules allowed for an asset-forward presentation, providing a rich, visual experience. Marino’s new digital identity more accurately portrays the modern, flexible, well-rounded firm that it has become, showcasing its work, clients, and successes prominently and proudly. To accompany this visual rework, Marino also needed updated messaging and language to match. We created comprehensive messaging across 10 site pages, 9 case studies, and over 20 team bios, with a holistic approach that ensured unified voice across the experience. 

With a palette of new CMS tools and a complete rejuvenation of its public-facing website, the Marino team also is now able to refresh its content with updated clients, news, thought leadership, and case studies nimbly, all while maintaining the sleek design considerations that were established during Ronik’s collaborative process.

Elevating a standout PR firm in a crowded landscape

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

Our creative process was guided by Urban Quotient’s human-centered ethos, their design process, and their existing brand identity. While the logo would remain, we connected elements of the firm’s approach with visual and interactive metaphors of the namesake “quotient” to create a new, distinctive design language.

To support the high quality case studies and assets, a customizable, modular Case Study template was implemented in the content management system. This structure allows content editors to quickly and intuitively build Case Study pages with a robust toolset of storytelling components that result in a cohesive yet organic feel.

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The logo—a sharp representation of the “quotient” concept—was given movement on the homepage to give it an active, adaptive feeling, changing from its full to symbolic form. For distinctive visual flair that speaks to the firm’s design process, we animated computational drawings taken directly from UQ projects, serving as the building block of the identity.

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Reflecting an architecture firm’s unique vision

To commemorate its 100th anniversary, the Council wanted to create a digital experience to highlight a selection of its rich archival assets and tell the story of the organization and of foreign relations over the past century. The site’s intended audience was primarily existing members who were already familiar with the CFR story and history. To keep the content engaging for these members, as well as an unfamiliar global audience, it needed to be presented in a clear and compelling narrative.

Our process began by identifying the tentpole narratives and multimedia assets, as an outline for the content and user experience. The goal was to accomplish a complete historical picture using a variety of interactive storytelling techniques, in a presentation that allowed for users to explore the story in a non-linear way. The solution is an interactive experience with sections for the CFR timeline, a membership evolution infographic, photo gallery of notable speakers, “This Day in History”, and more—each with a unique style of interactive presentation, each their own self-contained “episode”.

To fully realize the large, complex build while maintaining performant experience and responsive design, all while working within rigid timelines, Ronik collaborated with our development partner, Perpetual, for the implementation. Parallel work processes of content creation with the client team and iterative design and development allowed for maximum efficiency, while frequent touch points between all our teams ensured all development considerations were kept in mind throughout the design process. 

Following the launch of the site, the CFR team had planned additional content to be added to the site throughout the year as the centennial celebrations continued. To allow for this drip of additional site updates, we provided the design system and back-end for CFR’s development team to seamlessly pick up and evolve as needed.

Celebrating a Century: An Interactive History

ronik

iCivics

JFK Terminal 4

Identifying and Tackling Manipulated Media

GE Empowered Women’s Health

Marino

Ryllace

Urban Quotient

Council on Foreign Relations