Moving EDGEucation
A feel-good collaboration with a Canadian entrepreneur working to get students moving in the classroom.
Role: Logo Designer, Web Designer
Moving EDGEucation is a Canadian education company working within the field of social emotional learning. The business's founder, Amy Tepperman. has worked with thousands of students and teachers over the years to challenge the way certain subjects are taught in the classroom. Her Moving EDGEucation Approach is a programme that integrates movement with curriculum (imagine a classroom where students are up on their feet moving to music while learning math or literacy). The basic idea is to help students engage more than just their mind during the school day. The business itself includes a number of products including all-day sessions led by her, workshops for educators, and online resources for classroom use.
A close colleague, Erin Higgins of With Love Marketing, had been working with Amy for some time to develop a new marketing plan and new positioning for Moving EDGEucation's brand. Erin brought me onto the project to completely redress the company's visual representation — beginning with the logo.
My aim with each new logo concept was to create a new mark that embodied what I saw as the 3 key qualities of Moving EDGEucation's brand – mindfulness, playfulness and most importantly, the programme's educational benefits. Even though the word moving was already in the name, I wanted the logo itself convey some form of movement, whether that be in letterforms or some additional visual element. The various concepts began their lives in my sketchbook and I developed a lot of those sketches into full-colour layouts — some of which worked, some of which did not.
During the development process, I felt strongly that it was important for Amy and Erin to see the logo in the sort of real-world contexts that the logo might actually appear (from my own position, this helped to reveal strengths and weaknesses in the concepts that I otherwise overlooked).
We quickly zeroed in on a direction that everyone was happy with. After some further explorations of typography and colour, we settled on using this concept almost exactly as first presented. (After one final round of finessing which changed the motion of the 3 spherical atoms within the logo.)
Moving EDGEucation had an established colour palette based on the educational pedagogy used in their lessons, and though many of the bolder colour palettes were more to my tastes, the more muted colours we settled on were more appropriate for the brand.
Moving EDGEucation's original site
(click to enlarge)
In my opinion, the company's website wasn't pulling its weight to explain Amy's incredible programme. Like many young businesses, Moving EDGEucation had naturally evolved in a number of ways since it's creation in 2010 (not the least of which was a significant name change in 2017). Unfortunately, MovingEDGEucation.com reflected this evolution: holdovers from previous incarnations of the site and the branding were pervasive across the site.
When I first encountered the site, a lot of the top level information about the business was spread across five pages that weren't intuitive to a first-time visitor. We restructured a lot of this content to live on three pages. The Home page was designed and rewritten to be a little more “sales-y” to appeal to visitors unfamiliar with the company. This allowed us to lean on industry jargon a little more on the “Who We Are” and “How We Can Move You” pages, which explained the business' bonafides and the services offered.
There are many moving parts to Amy's business, all of which needed to be represented in some way. I knew there was a danger of the site being overwhelming for first-time visitors, so I introduced two devices which acted as a visual respite from the site main's copy:
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Parallax boxes that included quotes from field experts about
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Bite-sized facts that functioned like a pull quote. These distilled the longer text into a more easily digestible message for anyone looking to quickly pull salient points.
Amy is a former animator and creates many of Moving EDGEucation's videos and print resources herself, so I felt it was important that all my work on the logo and website could be easily continued and adapted by Amy going forward. After all, the logo and site design were there to bolster her amazing product, and I wanted them to be as unobtrusive to her day-to-day work as possible.
