Week 9B Outside of Class: Art of Recycle Interview & Creative Strategy

Over the weekend I was able to talk to one of the owners of Art of Recycle, Josh, or as he's known to the public, Mr. Nobody Special.  My main questions for him were concerning the keypoints of Art of Recycle's mission, who he thinks is currently using his site, & what audience he would like to see using the site.

The mission is to heal and grow community.  The objective is to promote awareness of the value of the resources we are sending to the landfill every day and to teach skills to empower people to make use of these essentially free supplies in their world around them.

The current users are primarily local residents that are looking for information about workshops, as well as people searching for a local craft store.

Additional prospective users are in several classes: 1) people interested in the greater reuse/upcycle community (this is why we have developed the our neighbors page with scrap stores around the world and are working on collecting a list of upcycle artists and galleries), [and]  2) people looking for quality DIY tutorials on a broad range of reuse projects. We have a connected blog with our own tutorials on it.

Based on this interview and issues discovered last week, I've decided to go about the following creative strategy...

• Create consistent donation button
• Restructure and clarify navigation
• Create content pages that are easier-to-read, as well as more exciting
• Combine imagery and visual hierarchy to make Art of Recycle's mission and unique offering more apparent 

While doing research, I found Smashing Magazine's Non Profit Website Design: Examples and Best Practices to be a great resource.