There are multiple different outputs I can produce in order to help the Participatory Collective achieve their goals during this commission.
Identity
Creating a strong brand identity is the first step to gaining recognisability and conveying your goals. It is the very centre of the brand and it should speak to the user whilst not using any words. Brand identity is mainly going to be established via logo, tagline, colour, layout and typography. These features need to work together in order to convey the Collective’s attitude towards community, their selflessness, their impact, and their strong desire to create change in a flawed system, whilst remaining warm and non-confrontational. It is a vital part of what it means to be an official brand, it will be the first thing that people think of when Participatory Collective comes to mind, and it will remain prominent throughout every part that they touch or associate themselves with, so it has to be handled with a lot of care.
Website
A website is the most convenient and easiest way in which the Participatory Collective can compile information and offer services through. Their website needs to tell a story, it needs to sympathise with its users and show a deep understanding whilst offering them support. A recurring themes with the collective is community, selflessness and healing, the website has to show a realistic but positive journey that the user will be taken on to the path of recovery. The website also has to be easy to navigate and comprehend in order to not exclude any demographic of people. The brand identity will be very prominent on the website, so the UI has to accommodate it and via layout, colour and shape psychology and work with it not against it in order to keep a consistent atmosphere and attitude.
Uniforms/merchandise
As an addition to their brand identity, when hosting in person campaigns and charity events it would be vital to distinguish volunteers and workers from the crowd. I will need to thing carefully of the layout and the brand identity design to make sure its compatible within multiple different forms, not only just website. That includes staff uniforms and possibly merchandise like caps, lanyards and rubber bracelets that would be sold at events, giving the crowd another initiative to fund the cause.
Social media
In order to spread the cause and bring attention of the ideas fund, it would be wise to establish a strong social media presence. It drastically increases the chances of new users and possible collaborators finding out about the Participatory Collective, as well as making it much easier for them to update their followers and users on recent events, changes, and even services they provide. This can be done via mockups of social media posts and shorts, such as instagram reels, facebook reels or tiktoks. The designs will need to change quite a lot depending on the chosen site, since some have a more forgiving safe space (the area which we could use, which will not be obstructed by UI elements of the site) than others.
This will also highly alter which target demographics will be attracted, since if we use only tiktok which is primarily an entertainment app, we will not get a lot of serious enquiries, or if we use facebook reels, we might only attract an older target demographic since it’s not often used by more modern leaning young adults.