Week 5, Day 3 A Plan For Collaboration

Step 1: The proposal

The Wake County Animal Shelter is a wonderful organization that could use the talents of our local AIGA chapters to spiff up animal photos and bios to make animals more appealing to potential adopters. The website itself has a good user interface, but due to the lack of time and resources the setup is generic and lacks the design needed to grab people's attention. The site is constructed to get the animals up quickly and efficiently. What I propose is to create templates into which a user may import the animal's picture and information into quickly and easily, but that are well designed to make the animals appear in their best light.

Step 2: Identify and contact artist(s)

The next step would be to propose a  joint collaboration of the Raleigh and Meredith College chapters of AIGA. Not only would it give designers an opportunity to donate their talents to a worthy cause, but would be a wonderful opportunity for design students to work hands-on with professional designers and learn some new stuff along the way.

Step 3: Create a timeline and a way for the groups to interact.

Send out the initial proposal during the summer before school begins. Have the first meeting in late August. Set a goal date such as the end of the Fall 2011 semester. Possibly create a Facebook page where designers can swap ideas. Have a face to face check-in once per month. Identify a person(s) to keep track of selected templates and another person(s) to make them web-ready.

One possible idea would be something like this (mind you, these are rough sketches):

Here is Faith, one of the pups I photographed this week. I took
her bio info from the WCAS site and implemented it here.

A variation on that would be this:

Hope this fits the bill. Happy shooting!