Making the Product Speak for Itself at Inquiry by Design
The Challenge
Inquiry by Design was launching a new middle school ELA curriculum, and every student reader and teacher's guide needed a new cover. At my first trade show with the company, I noticed teachers walking past our merchandising rack without stopping. So I started asking them why. The most common answer: they thought our materials were for grade three.
They were not. The old covers put the reader number at the top, and the grade level sat small in the bottom corner. Someone glancing at a rack saw a big "3" and moved on. The spine colors had the same problem. Colors varied within a single grade with no system behind them, so district warehouses struggled to match teacher guides to the right student readers, and the booth looked busy instead of cohesive.
The Solution
The redesign had two jobs: make the product easy to understand at a glance for the adults who buy, sort, and teach with it, and make the readers feel like real books students would want to own.
Put the grade front and center. Every cover now leads with the grade and unit, so a teacher can tell at a glance which grades we serve.
Give each grade one color. A single spine color per grade made the full set easy to sort in a warehouse, easy to match in a classroom, and cohesive on a trade show rack. I designed the covers with the booth in mind, so the full curriculum would read as one program from across the aisle.
Make readers feel like real books. Student readers are consumables that students take home, so we wanted them to look like books a student would be proud to keep on a shelf, not school textbooks. Company branding stays small on the front, with the full logo on the back.
Make students part of the brand. I launched a student art program that invited customer schools to submit artwork for the covers. I built the submission website along with the approval and parent permission process, turning customers into co-creators of the product they teach with.
The Results
The new covers were well received by teachers and districts. Educators can now match every teacher's guide to its student reader at a glance, and the full set reads as one program instead of a collection of books. The covers became the centerpiece of the company's trade show booth, where the grade is the first thing a passing teacher sees.