Read Ahead
Read Ahead is a reading comprehension tool designed to maximize a student’s reading time by highlighting key ideas with motion. Text is filtered and tagged by an Artificial Intelligence engine and key ideas are then animated and then highlighted within the text. The tool’s purpose is to give teachers the ability to guide students through a desired text in order to help students develop the ability to make predictions and infer meaning.
Role:
Creative Director, Marketing Director, UI/UX Designer, Graphic & Web Design
Team:
Roxanne Russell, Instructional Design
William Hall, Web/Application Developer
Vijay Nadadur, AI Developer
First came the logo. Then the grant proposal, trademarking and patent application.
The logo was designed using bright, primary colors and presented as an app icon you might see on a smartphone. The sheets of paper slightly covering the type hints at the action of reading ahead by turning the page. The message is that taking action leads to improvement, especially in the digital age where tools are at your fingertip.
Then we kicked off app & AI development beginning with the User Interface (UI), icons and badges.
Teachers do a lot of their work on laptops or desktops so it made sense for the app to exist as a website. This gave us a lot of room to develop a fairly flat UI with almost all functionality available within one or two clicks.
We anticipated adoption to be highest at the elementary and junior high school levels so we incorporated visually fun messaging elements and badges.
Production and The Investor Shuffle
Once the app, AI and UI were playing nicely together, Read Ahead officially launched and the idea was pitched to investors.
Disclaimer: This was my first real animation.
Marketing
Quote Posters
Our marketing efforts consisted of going right to our audience with something they’d use to decorate their classrooms or offices – Quote Posters. We went to several trade shows and schools to present the tool right to the teachers that would be using it and handed out our quote posters as swag and leave behinds.
Big Ass Bookmarks
In an effort to capitalize on the success of our quote posters, we refined our direct mail and leave behind collateral into bookmarks. These were double-sided rack cards that connected our product to reading, the printed page, history and pop culture. This campaign quickly grabbed attention and was wildly successful.
