"A classic." —juror Kelly Goto
"This pitch-perfect environment treats each beloved Muppet with the same level of quality and detail we've come to expect from Sesame Street." —juror David Wright
Overview: This new site and its 100 revamped Muppet pages have two audiences: three-year-old children and Elmo, Cookie Monster, Big Bird and all the other Muppets. The site makes both audiences happy; it's been excessively tested by children and proven ready to house present and future Muppet residents. With a CMS that enables an in-house team to change settings to give one character prominence over the others and to add or delete characters over time. It's a playful site comprised of individual pages featuring each Muppet's most popular videos and links to the character's best friends. More grown–up content includes bios of the men and women behind Muppet development, links to share pages and downloadable wallpapers.
• The concept phase started in late 2010 and the website launched nine months later.
• The build was integrated with Sesame Street's existing LifeRay CMS and is a mix of HTML, Flash and JavaScript.
• A landing page character grid (with blocks that resize to accommodate video animations on rollover) resizes and repositions characters to make each visit feel unique.
Comments by Anders Jessen:
What was the most challenging aspect of the project? "Conceptually, the most challenging part of the project was to understand the psychology of every single Muppet. Even though all 100+ Muppets on Sesame Street are important, fifteen of them get a bit more exposure and make up the grid of the section's interactive landing page. These fifteen Muppets each have unique detail pages and include links to games, downloadable coloring book pages and playlists. During development our entire office was full of sketches and scribbles. We also had meetings with the people who control each Muppet and a Muppet expert from Sesame Street, who could help us determine the exact amount of chocolate pieces in Cookie Monster's name or why Elmo should have a rainbow in the background and Abby a prince."
