Website Address: The Nature of Cites
Intent
The Nature of cities is a website you can think of as a digital magazine with a heavy focus on current presented issues in cities where the ‘voice’ of a city’s nature is muffled by the buildings and pavement. It is platform, a place to give room to expand and show articles composed by diverse people of different occupational background (designers to scientist to entrepreneurs, etc) and from different countries as well. The focus of the content on this website all revolve around the environmental core goals for cities to be more “Sustainable, resilient, livable”. This is done through insights given by authors through different mediums like essays, podcasts, and even reviews.
Voice
Multiple voices are shown throughout but mainly is conversational as it sparks the reader to think more deeply on the subject at hand. Designers, artists, professors, scientists, etc. Website is open to the general public but is still very informative for those whose background are one of the same the article contributors, it gives the space to read their work in their own words of how they would express the issue.
Tone
The tone as well as the voice is dependent on which page is visited. Many authors that are hosted on the website come from different backgrounds with different knowledge. Bunch of text with occasional amounts of pictures and video clips shown to help break up the text to convey the message to the reader. So some might have more visual representations compared to others. i.e perhaps more art/design heavy visuals compared to maps and graphs of data.
Brand
Color theme of greens, classic contrasts: white and black. The website is objective as all the context are presented in different mediums to express their ideas towards the environmental core goals. It can be seen as an in between casual and upscale type. Wide sliding mechanism for different articles show's title, subtitle and blown up image related to the article’s topic to show a more sleek, more cleaner presentation.
Persona 1: Student Sarah
Sarah is a college student in an intro environmental science course. Her final assignment in the class requires a 10 page essay on an environmental topic of her choice. As long as it is current, there’s a problem and able to research for possible solutions to those problems while overall it can researched on. Since it is an intro class, Sarah isn’t exactly sure what environmental problem she is interested in so she decided to look around online to different websites for some insight and came across to thenatureofcites.com. On the front page, Sarah is slightly offput as there isn’t much text on the front page but mainly taken up by the wide sliding mechanism. She realizes that she needed to scroll do to see if anything is there or else she would need move on to a different website that gave her direct information on first click. Sarah sees different articles of issues and the city it is in. Many articles are very text heavy based it is likely that Sarah decides to close the browser tab and go search elsewhere for something maybe more specific however she saves the website as a bookmark as she might want to come back to it in the future.
Persona 2: Professor Anderson
Professor Anderson is teaching a planning sustainable city course. While composing the syllabus, he decides to check on various websites of citable authors and their works towards reaching sustainability goals whether it's through city planning or design. By coming across thenatureofcities website he found that it was a credible source with various authors and their input of what challenges exist and ones that interest the authors by reading the about page of the website. Professor Anderson decided that to make sure he could find specific pieces that would be interesting for discussion in class, the professor went straight to the search bar and typed up keywords rather than to fumble with rest of the front page because the professor is smart enough to stay on task than to get distracted. With an interface like that it can be easy to start searching as long as one has an idea, like professor anderson. After finding some articles written by designers and even architecture, Professor Anderson decides to add some into the syllabus as additional readings that will hopefully get the students more engaged and hopefully not bore them more to death.
Persona 3: Newsreader Robert (part of the general public of people who reads news)
In current day, getting information about the world and the world is up to on a daily basis has never been easier with smartphones and computers. Robert likes to occasionally look up on the news to see what is currently going on. By going to a general news website (one that covers multiple ground), he sees some article that pertains to extreme climate change to certain cities and the damage it caused. Robert felt concerned and thought about how one day something might happen to his city that can cause a disruptance to his home and family. Robert decides to search around for a website that focused on identifying types of environmental problems and possible solutions in the making. Thus Robert came across thenatureofcites website. First off, Robert comes off as slightly disappointed as nothing really caught his eye. With just blocks of texts, some pictures and common color scheme as many environmental related websites, he decides to search directly on anything related to extreme climate change or even his city. After a slow loading process, Robert knew that if what he wanted did not immediately show up, he will be taking his business elsewhere. Finds some stuff interesting but not exactly what he was looking for, he decides to search elsewhere that is more specific to his home hoping to find information on his city, how prone it is to extreme weather conditions and if his city is up to facing it. Robert thinks that he might reconsider where he is living depending on what he finds.
Wireframe
Copydeck
- Title: the nature of cities
- Header: Cities are ecosystems of people, nature, and infrastructure
- Body Copy: Latest...ESSAY CROSSTALK, GLOBAL ROUNDTABLE, PODCAST:, REVIEWS REACTIONS Same as the body but starts with “Recent ______....” PLACE & DESIGN, ART & AWARENESS
Competition
Often many environmental related websites tend to reuse the same color schemes with very few variants. This is not uncommon since generally, environmental; nature has always been associated with variants of green. This site can stand out as articles are written by authors with given short bios so it can make the website very informative and creditable for research or for school projects. Compared to other websites, a user can easily move onto another since the first thing seen isn’t completely clear that they need to scroll down to get more information. Although it is more clean and not as very cluttered in appearance, which helps some users not get as confused.