Odell Education — High School Literacy Program

The Opportunity

Odell Education develops an open-source high school English Language Arts and literacy curriculum, published freely for teachers and students at ela.odelleducation.com. The program spans four grade levels and dozens of units built around canonical and contemporary texts. Its challenge was one of coherence: a large body of educational content needed a single, credible visual identity — one that felt modern and rigorous, yet approachable for the classroom.

I led brand identity and digital product design for the program: a grade-level visual system, typography, stylescapes, a unit cover language, the information architecture, and the program website. The goal was to make a sprawling curriculum read as one coherent product across print and screen.

The Approach

The brand centers on a navy-and-orange geometric language — dotted grids, circles, arcs, triangles, and dashed line-work — that flexes across the four grades. Each grade earns its own composition of the same shape vocabulary, so Grade 9 through 12 feel distinct yet clearly related. Montserrat carries the typography, chosen partly because it is a free Google font suited to both print and digital, keeping the open program truly open.

For the individual literary units, a brighter, more expressive palette gives each text — from The Great Gatsby to Things Fall Apart — its own cover while staying inside a shared system. On the product side, I mapped the information architecture and teacher user stories, then designed the program website that brings the identity to life: grade landing pages, unit overviews, sections, lessons, and activities.