Raquel contacted us to help her create the look and brand for their new community for young women, Girlfriends’ Planet.  They had a clear vision for the structure of the site and wanted to include a lot of features like a custom quiz, polling, movie and music recommendations, along with a store and a forums community

With the help of one of our favorite illustrators, Dan Sipple, who we’ve worked with in the past, characters to represent the various authors on Girlfriends’ Planet were created, along with two male characters to represent two “types” of guys women date — the Bad Boyfriend and the Bachelor.  The male perspective on the site is represented in blue and is dubbed Planet Boyfriend.

For their community,after much discussion and brainstorming, we all decided Ning personalized social networks would be a great fit for Raquel’s project needs. We set up their Ning community and mapped the community subdomain on girlfriendsplanet.com to mask the Ning URL and then customized the community design for the most seamless user experience possible with the platform. We also pulled the activities feed from the Ning community into the main Girlfriends’ Planet site and vice versa, with the GP blog feed pulled into the Ning community, so users never miss a thing.

Raquel wanted a clean design with lots of fun and frivolity, but didn’t want it to be overwhelming. The volume of content we needed to incorporate made this a wonderful challenge and Raquel was thrilled with the result… as are we!