Designing a creative reuse nonprofit's first-ever website, turning scattered informal networks into a platform artists and theaters actually trust.
Overview
A Fast-Growing Nonprofit
San Diego Shared Resources for the Arts (SDSRA) is a nonprofit working to redistribute creative materials to schools, theaters, and individual artists across San Diego. SDSRA has identified community demand: swap meets and survey data show resource sharing behaviors already exist, but the current ecosystem is scattered and informal.
SDSRA lacks a clear, scalable public presence for creatives, arts organizations, donors, and community partners to understand or engage with its mission. This limits participation and slowing its development from a promising initiative into a trusted regional resource.
The Problem
Building Trust from the Ground-Up
Our task was to design SDSRA's first website from scratch. We faced the challenge of designing for a community-driven exchange built on trust. Our team wondered:
How might we establish credibility for both established recyclers and newcomers, communicate broader impact beyond material exchange, and make engagement feel low-barrier and worth returning to?
We interviewed artists, theater professionals, and existing SDSRA participants. We were surprised by the role of community beyond transactions. We expected users to care about access to materials as their first priority, and definitely didn't expect ho they described wanting events, newsletters, creative spaces, and connection.
One participant described the gap they hoped the creation of SDSRA could fill:
"An active and engaging community — newsletters, Instagram, giveaways, events… not just to trade but to connect."
This reframed the project to extend beyond a resource library into a community hub that drives material exchange.
Competitive Analysis
From these analysis, I learned to balance emotional community content (testimonials, photos, participant voices) with practical resource discovery (inventory previews). While research prioritized community, a purely communal site risks feeling vague.
To solve this, I used community elements to build trust, while keeping CTAs and navigation focused on direct action. This strategy created a warm and actionable user experience.
User Flows
Intuitive Pathways that Reduce Friction
General Public Flow
Donor Flow
Prototype
Hello, world! Demystifying SDSRA's Mission
Our team created mid-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. We prioritized the desktop interface due to our research.
Iterations
Variations for Client Requests
Our clients at SDSRA loved the color scheme and flow of the pages. They requested for:
Sans-serif, rounded fonts that are bolder for higher contrast
Text use over graphics, they ultimately preferred a text logo and and CTA > graphics
Use of playful and bright color scheme
A shared catalog section they would later implement
The Final Website
A Centralized, Reliable Community
The final site positions SDSRA as a trusted creative resource rather than a swap meet calendar with a URL. It gives the organization a platform to communicate impact, grow its community, and shift public perception of creative reuse from charity to infrastructure.
This scalable design also leaves room to grow. As SDSRA progresses, they can add member profiles, request forms, mailing lists, and a blog as natural extensions of our structure.
