Beacon Street Girls
website and interactive games
Beacon Street Girls are a series of books written for tween girls ages 9–14 and produced following consultations with experts in different areas of teen research. The girls are a group of five friends, and their dog Marty, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts who have new adventures in each book. The website promotes the books as they are launched (23 so far), and gives background information for each girl, along with games and activities.
I worked with the creative director of B*Tween Productions, the original publishers of the Beacon Street Girls, to conceive and design a website that fulfilled the brand of the books and revealed the characters of the five girls. I directed custom illustrations and Flash animation to give interactive life to the pages, and designed a series of branded games for each girl. Charlotte’s Bead Game, for instance, allows a girl to drag-and-drop glass beads with letters on a bracelet string and send it to a friend. Katani’s Fashion Frenzy allows a girl to create custom fashion outfits by selecting blank clothing items and applying patterns and colors. The results can be shared with friends. Even the website header was interactive; girls can change the background to various locations from the stories and roll over the assembled characters to select their profile pages.
The series was licensed by Simon & Shuster, and later by Penguin Random House. The Beacon Street Girls partnered with Nancy Drew and were written up in The New York Times. The site was a Webby Award finalist for Best Children’s Site. Their branding today still uses the designs I created twelve years ago.
What I did
- Design
- Game concepts
- Flash development