Working with Public Thread
The content of this page is my contribution to a semester-long period of working with a local upcycling nonprofit in Grand Rapids called Public Thread. As a small nonprofit, they rarely had room in their budget to put towards marketing to consumers or other businesses.
My class and I had the opportunity to not only fill Public Thread's design & marketing gap, but also learn a lot about business to business connections, working together as a team, and the boundaries of nonprofit work.
Collaborating with a team on this project makes it difficult to present this work as purely my own, but the sections below show the work that I either led production of or was the most involved in.
Interactive Survey
Do people even care about sustainability?
Impact vs. $$$
I designed a survey for my research group to use to gauge what people from our area thought about sustainability. We wanted to get an idea of how much something like Public Thread would be able to affect different audiences.
We asked the question: On a scale from "I only care about price" to "I'm willing to pay anything to help the environment," where do you stand?
It turns out, more than half of the answers were towards the "only care about price" part of the scale.
Style Guide
An updated, consistent, and versatile identity.
Colors & Symbols
It's difficult to associate colors to a brand that can't control the color of it's product, but as a team we felt introducing a hue was necessary.
Typography
When leading the discussion about type choice, I urged the group to select typefaces that would be similar to what Public Thread originally had, but were more versatile and robust.
The Portfolio
A physical B2B marketing deck.
One of Public Thread's main areas of focus was business-to-business marketing. They really needed to be able to market to other businesses to get the type of orders they needed to thrive.
Without a proper way to manage a constantly changing inventory, and no exact catalog of products, we had to find a way to show what Public Thread was capable of and had done in the past. They needed a way to show other businesses what was possible without being too vague or unrealistic.
Updated Branding
The portfolio, as a client facing piece, features Public Thread's updated branding.
Clean Layouts
Simple Explanations of each product, with some environmental touches.
Swatch Panel
A physical way to organize & sample Public Thread's ever-changing inventory.
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