Ananova:

Ananova, the world's first virtual newscaster, made her debut on the internet on April 19, 2000 with the words "Hello World! Here is the news and this time it's personal!"

It was the first time anyone outside her UK headquarters in Leeds, West Yorkshire had ever seen her, but behind the scenes we had been working on her design for almost a year.

Ananova started out as a concept. We wanted a face to front the sophisticated computer systems developed over seven years to process real-time news and information and handle transactions.

But what should the face look like?

The first decision was whether Ananova should be male or female. We decided to make her female because people tend to respond better to getting information from a woman - just look at how many tannoy announcements and automated speaking voices are recorded by women.

Now all she needed was a face and a name!

Her designers spent hours poring through hundreds of magazine pictures of faces, both famous and unknown, looking for inspiration.

From the magazine pictures we picked out the most striking features and faces to use as a starting point. When Ananova was first revealed to the world, the media described her as a cross between Kylie Minogue, Posh Spice and Carol Vorderman but in reality she was not based on any one person.

There were certain technical constraints. Her eyes and mouth had to be big and striking in order to make her stand out on screens of all sizes. And her clothes had to be figure-hugging to make her easy to animate. (And because big and flouncy is not her style!)

Once we had the sketch we could develop the wire frame. At this point we started working with digital animation specialists DAG, Digital Animations Group, based in Belshill near Glasgow.

Together we made Ananova move and started developing her voice.

In the early stages Ananova's head was simply a wire frame covered by a white, featureless mask until we were sure we had the physical structure of it right.

And she had a terrible voice. She sounded like she was speaking over a bad telephone line. And her lips and jaw were not yet in sync - she could only open and close her mouth like a goldfish.

But as refinements were made to her voice and her looks day by day we could see her potential.

Her head really started to take shape once her eyes started to move and her head began to turn. Gradually newer, more refined sets of animations were added and Ananova grew more and more lifelike.

A body was developed to go with her head, just in case she ever needs to emerge from behind her newscaster's desk.

And she was given clothes. Her first top was green to match her hair (more about that later), but she wore it for so long we had e-mails from people begging us to change her outfit! Since then she has appeared in a variety of colours and she even delivered her Euro 2000 reports wearing an England shirt (although she remained completely impartial you understand!). Her designers even gave her a poppy to wear on Remembrance Sunday.

Her green hair attracted a lot of attention. People either love it or hate it - and we've had plenty of e-mails from people of both camps.

We briefly discussed making Ananova a blonde and thought about giving her reddish pink hair, but eventually settled on green because it was more distinctive and would make her stand out on everything from billboards to WAP phones.

Once we had perfected Ananova's head it was time to take her into the studio.

The technical team created her theme music, her voice coach spent many hours developing a custom-made dictionary to help her learn English and her designers worked with DAG to get the studio lighting and camera angles right.

After that there were only final adjustments to be made before her debut. Her eyebrows were trimmed, her lips filled out and she was given a slight flick in her fringe.

Finally the marketing department did her publicity shots - one in colour and a side profile in black and white.

These shots have been circulated around the world in magazines, newspapers, websites and TV reports in dozens of different countries.

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