This project started with a casual question. Jim was finishing up a book for National Geographic called Trails of Tears, Paths of Beauty, when one of the NGS editors asked him if he ever designed web sites. Why yes, he replied. Gibson Design actually spends just about as much time designing web sites as books and print materials. It turned out NGS was planning a companion web site for a line of nature guides for children as a means of giving the existing print series some extra life in the marketplace. We started designing the project the very next week. The challenge was to make something fresh that would enrich the kids experience with their pocket guides, but to do it using predominantly the information and graphics that had been produced for the original books. The solution was a series of games, puzzles, and activities that reinforced what the kids could learn in the guides, with page references that sent them back to their pocket guides to find the answers they didn’t already know.

We built the site using Macromedia’s Flash—giving us a full range of tools to work with: animation, sound, interactivity, and even video if we wanted it. Unfortunately after we designed and built three months worth of activities, and NGS ran extensive marketing tests, they decided the possible return didn’t warrant the investment and they shut the project down. But you can still check it out on our staging server. I think you will find it quite fun.