Google Product Designer Creates New Graphic Novel Series, Friendbots

Vicky Fang is a former Google product designer, including products likes cars that talk to each other, robots you can build at home, or games you can play with your voice. She started writing coding books for very young children with the aim of support the growing need for early coding education, particularly for girls and minorities. This led to a number of STEM-themed (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) kid picture books such as Invent-A-Pet for Sterling and the about-to-launch Layla & The Bots through Scholastic. But after a run of competitive bids, she has now sold the worldwide rights to a new graphic novel series called Friendbots.

Friendbots is a STEM-inspired early graphic novel series about friendship and robots, that continues Fang's interests in explaining that kind of world to the youngest of us. The series was acquired by Andrew Arnold at HarperAlley, with two Friendbots books planned for launch in the spring of 2021. Her agent Elizabeth Bennett at Transatlantic Agency negotiated the deal.

Fang worked at Google as a Staff Interaction Designer responsible for Assistant for Kids & Families and leading creative with Disney and Nickelodeon, from 2015 to 2019, after a long career in web design, UX design, interaction design, mobile producer, game designer and developer, as well as founder of Interactive Spaces, working for Ogilvy and GE.

She also racked up a few TV appearances twenty years ago as an actor on TV series Charmed, L.A. Doctors, Diagnosis:Murder as well as the recurring character Gwen on Once & Again. You can find all sorts of thing on Google, as Vicky Fang must well know. Added to that, you can watch her talk about her previous books here.