A homeschool publisher behind Math-U-See, extending into schools, charters, and a Digital Toolbox dashboard. We delivered the design system, the four-persona research, the megasite IA, and the dashboard UX. The build paused before launch. The system itself is the deliverable.
Setup · 2023 → 2024
Math-U-See had spent two decades earning a homeschool following that felt like a small business. The new product surfaces had to keep that warmth and meet a school administrator on the same page.
Parents teaching their own kids at home. They came for blocks and a step-by-step sequence and stayed because the curriculum respected how children actually learn. The product had to feel like a teacher who shows up, not software that watches.
Charters, districts, and admins evaluating curriculum at the institutional level. They needed SSO, FERPA-aligned reporting, and a procurement story that fit a K-8 math sequence. Anything that read as homeschool-only died in the eval cycle.
The same product, told two ways, on one IA. That was the brief in a sentence.
The work crossed four overlapping surfaces. An account architecture for four customer types (parent, instructor, student, admin), with SSO and non-SSO variants. A megasite IA bridging the marketing site, the Math-U-See product line, and the new Digital Toolbox without alienating the existing homeschool base. A brand-as-portfolio pattern that kept Math-U-See and other product brands legible inside a parent-brand experience. And a design system to hold all of it together.
Demme had spent two decades building trust in the homeschool market through curriculum that families loved. The challenge was extending into schools, charters, and SSO-equipped institutions without losing the warmth that made the brand feel like a small business in the first place.
The megasite home composed against the system. Hero, the brand-as-portfolio shelf (Math-U-See plus four sibling lines), the homeschool / schools split, and the K through 8 sequence. Every color, type face, and radius reads from the Demme tokens.
Our award-winning, comprehensive learning tools support educators, parents, and students in schools and homeschools.
Free access to the first three lessons of each level of the Math-U-See Curriculum, virtual manipulatives, and more!
Instant access to lessons, digital manipulatives, instructional videos, and more.
Children thrive when learning alongside engaged parents, teachers, and family members — whether leading or supporting their education. Together, we foster lifelong learners.
Innovative learning solutions for homeschoolers, parents, and small groups since 1990.
Learn About UsWe built personas around four distinct users: the homeschool home leader, the homeschool community leader, the education administrator, and the young learner. Each has a different motivation for showing up, a different relationship with curriculum, and a different appetite for product polish. The IA needed to honor those differences without spawning four separate sites.
Research · Customer Personas
The personas below shaped every IA, account, and dashboard decision. Each maps to a real cohort already buying or evaluating Math-U-See, with goals and frictions specific enough to be testable.
Persona · 01
Parent · Daily teacher
A parent at home running curriculum across one or two grade levels. Found Math-U-See because it is tactile, sequential, and works for kids who froze on traditional math. Wants the digital toolbox to support that rhythm, not replace it.
Needs
Pushes back on
Persona · 02
Co-op + pod organizer
Runs a co-op or learning pod. Teaches multiple families' children at once, often across grade levels. Cares about scaling the same Math-U-See experience across students without becoming an LMS administrator.
Needs
Pushes back on
Persona · 03
School · Charter · District
Evaluates curriculum at the institutional level. Needs SSO, FERPA-aligned data handling, classroom-shaped reporting, and a path to roll Math-U-See into existing K-8 math sequencing without a full vendor procurement cycle.
Needs
Pushes back on
Persona · 04
Student · K-8
The student. Touches the Digital Toolbox surface most often. Cares about whether the lesson feels doable and whether progress feels real. The dashboard had to read warm, not corporate, without being childish.
Needs
Pushes back on
Design the system, not the skin.
Engagement principle · 2023
Design System
Demme is a curriculum publisher first, a software company second. The system had to hold both surfaces. We built four named brand colors (blue, demme-green, demme-orange, violet) and a DaisyUI-style semantic layer (primary, secondary, accent, neutral, status, with focus + content pairs), so product UI could lean on tokens while marketing could lean on the brand bucket directly.
Color Palette
Demme Orange
Accent · Brand Color 3Demme Green
Secondary · Brand Color 2Blue
Primary · Brand Color 1Violet
Tertiary · Brand Color 4Black
CopyWhite
SurfaceContrast Pairings
How the palette colors perform together — text on surface combinations ranked by contrast ratio.
Aa
Black
Aa
White
Aa
Demme Green
Aa
Black
Aa
Demme Orange
Aa
Black
Aa
Blue
Aa
Black
Aa
Violet
Aa
Black
Aa
Violet
Aa
White
Type System
Inter
Headlines, body, and product UI. Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold.
Bree Serif
Editorial headings only, 32px+. Pairs with Inter to soften long-form moments.
Values
The operating system. What the brand commits to, every time.
Math is learned in sequence. Skip a step and the next one wobbles. The product respects that order.
Parents are the experts on their kids. The system supports that authority instead of overruling it.
A family that started Math-U-See in second grade should still feel at home in eighth. The brand has to carry across the arc.
A school administrator should land on the same brand and feel met, not redirected.
Character (Brand Personality)
Five traits that turn values into behavior.
Hands-on
Math-U-See teaches with manipulatives. The product carries that physicality forward in plain language and step-by-step pacing.
Familial
Twenty years of homeschool trust did not come from corporate polish. The voice still reads like a teacher who knows your kid by name.
Patient
No leapfrogging. Every screen earns the next screen. The IA reflects that pacing.
Inclusive
Homeschoolers and admins reach the same shelf. The brand treats both like the actual customer they are.
Brand Pillars (Messaging)
The three things this brand always says — the messages every piece of work ladders back to.
The product promise
Math-U-See works because the lessons stack. The Digital Toolbox carries that same logic into software. Every screen is a step. Every step earns the next.
The market promise
A homeschool parent and a school administrator land on the same brand and both feel met. No marketing site for one and a procurement portal for the other. One door, two paths inside.
The voice promise
Demme is a publisher with a portal, not an LMS with a brand attached. The voice keeps that order. Tools serve the lesson. The lesson never serves the tools.
Voice
How the brand sounds out loud — the tone every word inherits.
Speak like a teacher who respects parents as the actual experts on their kids.
Math-U-See is tactile and sequential. The voice should feel the same way: concrete, step-by-step, never academic.
Honor the homeschool base while making schools feel welcome. Never code-switch into corporate.
A LearnDash-backed lesson surface for parents, instructors, and students, sharing one account architecture.
The Digital Toolbox sits at the center of the engagement. Parents, instructors, and students log into the same product surface, with role-aware navigation and a lesson-shaped content model that respects how Math-U-See families already work.
The dashboard is built around three patterns: a primary lesson workspace, a portfolio of progress signals, and a secondary nav for switching between courses, students, and accounts. Every component is mapped to a token in the system, so when the team eventually returns to the build, the surface is theme-able from a single semantic layer.
The Lesson 5 dashboard rebuilt against the system. Lesson workspace, manipulative cue (orange ten-bars and green unit blocks honor the Math-U-See vocabulary), problem set with status, progress portfolio, instructor note. Sits inside the dashboard chrome that authenticated parents, instructors, and students share.
The mobile nav was the longest-running visual conversation in the engagement. Top-bar 0 through 5 trace the exploration: nameplate priority, account-switcher visibility, the search affordance, the "where am I" cue, the way the homeschool wordmark cohabitates with a Math-U-See product crest.
Top-bar 3 became the working frame the team tested against. It carries the smallest amount of chrome that still holds three roles, two markets, and one brand without flinching.
Top-bar 0 through 5 rebuilt as live React components against the Demme tokens. Each iteration trades chrome for clarity. Top-bar 3 is the smallest amount of chrome that still holds three roles, two markets, and one brand — the working frame the team tested against.
Bar closed. Hamburger / search / Demmo wordmark / Login pill, with three quick-access pills below.
Menu reveals five top-level destinations and the Digital Toolbox login card.
Community expanded: Blog, Podcast, Events. Vertical guide ties the children to their parent.
Subjects expanded: Math-U-See, Spelling-U-See, WriteShop, Grammar. The working frame for the engagement.
Products expanded: Books, Manipulatives, Kits, Downloads. The shop side of the IA.
About Us expanded: History, Philosophy, Culture, Careers. The publisher story.
By the numbers · Nov 2023 → Aug 2024
A complete design system, a research base across four cohorts, a working dashboard pattern, and a brand foundation that holds two markets without code-switching.
01 · Engagement window
November 2023 through August 2024, end-to-end.
02 · Customer personas, evidence-based
Home leader, community leader, education administrator, young learner. Each tested against real Math-U-See cohorts.
03 · Figma pages, system-wide
Tokens, components, IA, flows, dashboard frames, and mobile-nav exploration in one file.
04 · Mobile-nav iterations shipped
Top-bar 0 through 5. Top-bar 3 became the working frame the team tested against.
Production ledger
2016 – 2019
Brand colors, named
Blue, Demme Green, Demme Orange, Violet. Layered over a DaisyUI-style semantic system.
Typefaces, paired
Inter for product and body. Bree Serif for editorial headings at 32px and above.
Account types modeled
Parent, instructor, student, admin. SSO and non-SSO variants for each.
IA versions, side by side
v4 and v4.5. Tested where homeschool paths could safely diverge from school-administrator paths.
LearnDash-backed dashboard pattern
Lesson workspace, progress portfolio, secondary nav. Token-mapped end to end.
Source preserved
Figma file archived. Tokens mirrored to code at tokens/brands/demme/.
Engagement window measured. The build paused before launch; the system itself is the deliverable.
The live build paused before launch. That happens. What stays is the work itself: a complete design language, a four-persona research base, a dashboard pattern proven against a real LMS, and a Figma file the team can pick back up. The brand tokens live in this repo at tokens/brands/demme/. The Figma file is preserved as the canonical archive.
A system that survives a paused launch is the kind of system that survives a real one. This is the documentation that work earned.
System / Artifacts
Tokens in DTCG format. Figma library. Code package. And a live voice demo so the AI reads this brand back to you, not some generic studio voice.
Voice demo
Hear Demme speak
Pick a prompt to see a response drafted in this brand’s voice.
Live brand book
Tokens, voice, components, and patterns rendered from the source on disk. The same record powers this engagement, the product, and the agents on stack.
Studio for founders, experts, and the institutions they run.
Living, working brands. Built with your team to keep growing.
