A four-year role retrospective. Designing — and building — playful digital experiences across every brand under the Fisher-Price umbrella, in a pre-mobile-standard, pre-UX-as-a-discipline internet.
Officially: Interactive Graphic Designer. In practice the role spanned the whole production pipeline — storyboarding the experience, designing the visuals, animating the moments, and front-end building the result. One designer, the full chain.
Designed engaging web experiences for Fisher-Price products and campaigns
Built 40+ interactive games and playful digital experiences for children
Created promotional content across Toys"R"Us, Kmart, Walmart, Amazon and retail partners
Developed email campaigns, ads and social to support product launches
Storyboarded, animated and front-end built experiences end-to-end
Helped bring Fisher-Price's playful brand personality into digital
In 2012, mobile-friendly sites were rare, social media was still new, and "UX" wasn't yet a role. Microsites were a vibrant, playful format you barely see today.
I worked at the front edge of the tooling — building animated HTML5 experiences in Adobe Edge as Flash was winding down. It was a moment when you could genuinely play with what a website could be.
You don't see many microsites today — but it was a time when a website could be pure play. — On the era this work lived in
Most projects started as a marketing request — promote a new toy, grow engagement with a brand or character, drive traffic to retail. But the real work started by asking: what does this mean for the parent, and what does it mean for the child?
What does the toy actually do? Learning, motor skills, imagination, social play. The promise underneath the packaging.
Which age group is it for, and how should the parent and child interact with the experience together or apart?
Play, explore, share, purchase. Every screen designed back from the action we wanted someone to take.
The same shape ran through every microsite, game, email and animation — light enough to move quickly, structured enough to keep dozens of campaigns unmistakably on-brand.
Partner with marketing to understand the product, the audience (kids + parents), and the campaign objective.
Turn the brief into the right digital form: microsite, game, email or ad. Choose the format that fits the goal.
Map the flow and interaction — the "UX" of the day. For animated builds, storyboard every beat before production.
Collaborate on visual style, story and tone so it felt playful, on-brand and age-appropriate.
Produce high-fidelity design and front-end build the experience — often animating it in Adobe Edge.
Run through the review chain (peer → director → marketing), refine, and ship across the campaign.
A real challenge: three designers, each with different skills and taste, all needing to produce work that looked like it came from one hand. And this was before collaborative tools — everyone worked in Photoshop, with no live co-editing.
The solution was a disciplined review process: we'd build, peer-review each other's work, review with the director, and only then bring it to marketing. That chain is how dozens of campaigns across every sub-brand stayed unmistakably Fisher-Price.
Brand consistency through process, not toolingWe introduced web patterns Fisher-Price had never used. When I brought the hamburger menu to the site, marketing worried moms wouldn't recognize it — so they hedged by labeling it "MENU." Once the pattern became a web standard, they dropped the label.
A small story, but it captures the role: a designer pushing modern patterns into a brand that was still feeling its way onto the modern web. We also began adding Fisher-Price's first mobile capabilities around the same time.
Five projects from the broader body of work — each one a different lever pulled on the same goal: make the brand feel like play in digital form.
An animated experience built into the Toys"R"Us site. Kids could explore the world, meet the characters and watch the commercial — then jump back to the retail page to buy the toys. Introduced the brand to children and made the experience engaging for kids and parents alike, in an era when mobile-friendliness was barely a thing.
An animated timeline walking users through how Fisher-Price was created — with little animated toys and objects along the way. Built in Adobe Edge, when HTML5 animation was the new frontier.
Browser games built around the brands — like a Little People "What's Different?" spot-the-difference game — giving kids a reason to stay, play, and come back. Simple, colorful, and click-friendly for small hands, in the Flash-to-HTML5 transition era.
Email campaigns for the full portfolio — Little People, Thomas & Friends and more — including promotional sends and "Moments of Joy" features. Two of the store-side promo sends shown here.
A rebuild of the Fisher-Price.com homepage as it existed during this era — hero band, category grid, brand cards, the rest. A snapshot of how the brand was meeting parents online at the time.
Open the live rebuild ↗At the time, performance data wasn't shared with designers — UX as a discipline barely existed, and we weren't part of that conversation. Looking back, that's the thing I'd change. With the engagement data we now treat as standard, I'd have closed the loop: testing gameplay flows, iterating on what kids actually played longest, and letting real behavior — not just brand instinct and marketing goals — drive the next version. The instinct-driven craft was strong; what was missing was measurement. Knowing what I know now, I'd design for measurement from day one. That gap is exactly what drew me toward UX. — Jessa Wolfe
Dozens of campaigns. Every brand under the Fisher-Price umbrella. A role that stretched from storyboard to front-end build — and the foundation for how I think about playful, human-centered design today.