Rally Reader had proven their product with children and schools. The next phase asked for more: a brand, an app and a website that could convince investors, schools and parents, and hold up as the product scaled to more platforms and more classrooms.
Over several years and projects, Yummygum designed almost everything on Rally’s visual side: the brand and logo, UX and the reading app, investor decks and the website. We also handled front-end development for the website and the Summer SOAR campaign, and handed over a Prismic-based site their own team could keep building on.
What we did
Visual Identity
Motion design
UX design
Product / app design (UI)
UX research
Website design
Front-end development
CMS implementation
Pitch & investor decks
Industry
EdTech
Client
01
Introduction
Rally Reader is a mobile app, used mostly on iPhone and iPad, that helps children become more fluent readers. Its approach is backed by scientific research and tailored to each child, reaching kids in the classroom and at home in ways a worksheet or a screen alone cannot. It is now used by schools across several US states.
02
A partner across every phase
Rally Reader has worked with us across several phases of their growth, from their first product to a funded scale-up expanding across the US and Canada. That long relationship let us design across their whole visual side, from the brand and UX to the reading app, the investor decks and the website, and build the parts we shipped ourselves, like the website and Summer SOAR. Because we already knew the product and the team, each new project started from shared context instead of a cold brief. Rally stayed the expert on reading science, and we stayed the partner who turned that into a product, a brand and a story that could keep growing with them.
03
Giving the product a face
Before Rally could scale anything, the product needed a brand that read as a real, trustworthy tool rather than a school worksheet. We designed the visual identity from the ground up: a distinctive logo built around a bold R mark and a Rally Reader wordmark, a warm orange-to-amber palette, and Helix, a geometric typeface chosen to feel modern and unpretentious while staying timeless. That identity became the face of the product for children, and the thing leadership put in front of investors and schools. Designed as a system, it holds up across the app, both website versions and Summer SOAR, so everything Rally ships reads as one product.
04
Serious science, made playful
Rally’s method is backed by real research, and the hard part was proving that credibility without burying kids and parents in scientific language. The brand carried the warmth, and the product carried the proof. This came together most in Summer SOAR, a reading challenge Rally ran with Indigo, Canada’s largest book retailer. We designed the gamified dashboard, leaderboards and a cast of avatar characters, and built the motion with GSAP and Rive so the animations felt alive. Because it handled children’s data, we designed it to store only what was needed, treating that responsibility as part of the experience rather than an afterthought.
05
A website their team can run
Rally’s marketing site lived in HubSpot, where every new page or section needed a developer and still took days. For version two we moved them to Prismic and Next.js, rebuilding the site as clean, reusable components wired into a visual page builder. Now their marketing team drags in sections, reorders pages and launches campaign landing pages on their own, with no technical help. New sections that used to take one to three days now take an hour or two, and because the stack matches what Rally’s own developers use, they can extend it whenever they want.
06
Built to scale across platforms
When we met Rally, the product ran in a narrow setup. Part of our job was helping it scale: onto iPhone and iPad, toward Android, and into more schools and homes across the US and Canada. Consistent brand and design decisions meant the app, both website versions and Summer SOAR still felt like one product, even as the surface kept growing. Today Rally is used officially by schools in several states, and the foundations we built, from the component library to the Summer SOAR codebase, are still solid enough to build the next phase on.
07
Results
Rally Reader turned a proven product into a scale-ready one, with a brand that holds up in front of investors, schools and parents. Their marketing team now runs the website themselves, shipping pages in hours instead of days. The product reaches children across more platforms and more US states, and Rally still returns to us for the speed and craft their own team does not keep in-house.
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