A social media net­work, cre­ative writ­ing project, inter­ac­tive game, and book series com­bined, The Aman­da Project was the sto­ry of Aman­da Valenti­no, told through an inter­ac­tive web­site and book series for read­ers aged 13 and up. On the web­site, read­ers were invit­ed to become part of the sto­ry by help­ing the main char­ac­ters search for Amanda.

The writ­ing-focused social media net­work was writ­ten and designed as if char­ac­ters from the Aman­da nov­els had put it togeth­er. Read­ers were encour­aged to enter the nov­els world, fol­low­ing clues and read­ing pas­sages that exist­ed only online, and ulti­mate­ly help­ing to shape the course of the Aman­da nar­ra­tive across eight nov­els. The first Aman­da nov­el (Invis­i­ble I, writ­ten by Melis­sa Kan­tor) came out 22 Sep­tem­ber, 2011. A dif­fer­ent Young Adult author wrote each nov­el; read­er cre­ativ­i­ty con­tributed to the res­o­lu­tions and com­plex­i­ties of var­i­ous plot points.

A Year of Creative Collaboration

The site devel­oped over a year of intense cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion with our client Fourth Sto­ry Media, a book pub­lish­er and new media com­pa­ny spear­head­ed by pub­lish­ing whiz Lisa Holton. Pri­or to start­ing Fourth Sto­ry, Lisa was Pres­i­dent, Scholas­tic Trade Pub­lish­ing and Book Fairs; man­aged the pub­li­ca­tion of Har­ry Pot­ter and the Death­ly Hal­lows; and over­saw devel­op­ment of The 39 Clues. Before that, she spent near­ly a decade devel­op­ing numer­ous best­selling, fran­chise-launch­ing series at Disney.

Our responsibilities on this project

Our work includ­ed con­tent strat­e­gy; inter­ac­tive strat­e­gy; com­mu­ni­ty strat­e­gy; busi­ness strat­e­gy; user expe­ri­ence design; infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture; graph­ic design; inter­face design; front-end devel­op­ment; back-end devel­op­ment; CMS inte­gra­tion and exten­sion; post-launch ongo­ing con­sul­ta­tion, design, and development.

Read more at Blissbat.net: The Aman­da Project Wants You, and vis­it the archived project.