HarperCollins Childrens

HarperCollins reached out to several major design companies requesting proposals to redesign their Childen’s website. Counterspace won the project due to the interface design work we produced during the selection process. However, even though we won the project on the merits of that design work, it was not exactly how HarperCollins wanted to reach its audience.

We discovered one of the major challenges of this site was that we had to create a design that appealed to multiple target audiences, including Children, Parents, Teachers & Librarians, and create three different interface designs in order to accomplish that goal.

Our solution was to create a design that “degraded” for the children version of the site, making the interface appear sketchy. While creating an interface that was cleaner for the other two audience types.

Counterspace worked with long term technology partner Sage Webworks and the internal technology team to completely overhaul and create a new custom CMS solution for the Childrens website. The solution to create a horizontal slider to display books on the homepage was groundbreaking and before the now overused javascript library scollers. To implement this we had to create a flash application that could interface with the CMS system and be able to content using the ISBN book codes.

The redesign of HarperCollinsChildren.com increased traffic, engaged users and became a catalyst for the redesign for many other HarperCollins websites. Some of the additional HarperCollins sites that counterspace redesigned include HarperTeen, HarperTeen FanLit and HarperCollins Avon Romance.