Phunics helps young learners build English pronunciation and vocabulary through interactive literacy programs. But its existing website wasn’t keeping up. While visually cohesive in parts, the design lacked the playfulness, clarity, and scale needed to genuinely engage children. More critically, the backend was rigid and difficult to update, severely limiting the team’s ability to evolve the site alongside their growing reading program.
For a platform serving early readers, the digital experience had to be intuitive and delightful. Without a design refresh and development overhaul, Phunics risked losing the attention of its most important audience.
Our approach
We partnered with Phunics to rebuild their digital learning environment from the ground up, combining child-friendly design, teacher-focused functionality, and editorial simplicity in one WordPress platform. By migrating to the block editor and introducing a unified design system, we gave their team full control over content while ensuring every page felt colorful, clear, and built for learning.
Learning through joyful design
At its core, Phunics is for children. So every design decision started there. We started by breaking down their existing assets, such as flipbooks, posters, and leaderboards, and distilled them into a unified system. A vibrant but purposeful color palette emerged, with bright, distinct hues tied to reading levels and themes. These hues energize the interface and engage young users, serving as functional guides for young learners and immediately drawing the eye.
The Poppins font, with its friendly curves and strong readability, anchors the typography. By varying size and weight, we created a clear visual hierarchy that guides children through pages and lessons with ease. Simple shapes like circles and rectangles add fun and familiarity, making navigation feel intuitive.
Typography: Poppins
Color palette
Reading that comes alive
At the heart of Phunics are its interactive flipbooks that mimic the tactile joy of turning physical pages. We preserved that magic with smooth, swipe-based page turns that work seamlessly on mobile phones and laptops, ensuring accessibility for all students.
But Phunics goes further. Students can record their reading aloud, a crucial step for improving English pronunciation, and submit a short summary of the book to demonstrate comprehension. The educators then review these submissions and provide feedback, all from the secure admin panel. Furthermore, reading contests, graded by teachers and teaching aids, are published on the public site to celebrate student progress and encourage participation. These custom features, built into a custom WordPress plugin, transform passive reading into active learning, all within a powerful, easy-to-manage system.
Tools that let teachers teach
The previous website relied on the classic WordPress editor, which offered little flexibility for layout or visual design. For Phunics, whose team includes teachers and teaching aids, none of whom are technical experts, this was a major constraint on their ability to update curriculum quickly.
We migrated everything to the WordPress block editor and built custom, brand-aligned blocks, including flipbook embeds, buttons, flexible layout structures, and more. Now, updating a lesson page or launching a new reading level takes minutes, not hours of developer time. The system has integrated visual consistency, so every page feels definitively like Phunics.
A foundation for fun phonics
Today, the Phunics site is a living extension of their educational mission to help every kid find the joy in learning English. It’s fast, colorful, and easy to use, whether you’re a young reader turning your first page or an educator assigning lessons. For the team behind it, the platform is more than just a website. It’s a powerful educational tool they truly own, ready to grow as Phunics does.
“Maples Design has provided us with a technology solution. They have been easy to communicate with, punctual, and very cooperative in terms of seeing each project through to the end.”
