Designing for Environmental Justice

We are taking a critical approach to the design of this website: challenge assumptions, be critical of dominant social values and design ideologies.

Question: What do you, as a group, value? What is the most important thing that you are trying to communicate to visitors of this site?

Before you work on the site:

Audience
Analog prototype of the site

Common elements of a website:

Site layout
- Consistency – develop an identity, pages have common feel, tone, color, shapes, fonts, etc.
- Navigation: Menus, links, table of contents (site map)
- Make information easy to find
- Think about plug-ins and widgets (within your installation but also that users might have to download)
- Header, footers, use of space
Content
- Keep paragraphs as short as possible (Web visitors don’t tend to stick around for a lot of text)
- Keep pages short
- Break up a lot of text, use white space
  - Sometimes break them up into multiple pages
- Accessibility
  - Add text descriptions to images and graphic elements
- Fonts and size – visibility

Things to consider

Test on different sized/resolution monitors, mobile devices
Test on different browsers
Try to get feedback

Keep in mind: Constraints

Though you can probably do everything you dream of, it often requires a lot of technical, coding/programming language skills, resources, or time that we may not have. The themes we choose may also have limitations to what you can do.