Designer Kit Casey and I worked with Karen Pelaez and Stephanie Vyce from the Harvard University Press to design a celebration website for the Press’ 100-year anniversary. Karen wanted to showcase 100 shareable books from the Press’ catalog in an interactive format.

We decided to design a virtual birthday cake, with each of the 100 candles representing a single book from the catalog that visitors can share using AddThis. As the days got closer to the 100-year date, the candles on the cake lit up, and visitors could click on a candle to see the book details. Visitors were able to save lists to their own libraries that could then be shared via AddThis to other platforms. Developed on WordPress with a special mobile-friendly layout for modern phones, the centennial cake is consumable on all devices.