Spruce News

An app delivering curated daily news to raise sustainability awareness on environmental topics, featuring articles, quick video briefs, and real-time stories for creators to share timely updates.

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Inspiration

Prompt: Develop a digital platform or app using Figma aimed at promoting environment sustainability by empowering individuals and communities to monitor, reduce, and manage their ecological footprint.

Thoughts: Our initial takeaway from this prompt was identifying the current environment issues that we face, and we found that there are a number of problems that we can take a closer dive into, such as climate change, pollution, deforestation, ocean acidification, etc. But we recognition these issues are bigger facing problems than an app itself cannot fully resolve. So instead, we decided to take a step back to look at the bigger picture and produce a solution that both informs and brings awareness to the audience while encouraging small opportunities for people to engage in acts of sustainability.

Solution: Our solution was to develop a News app/website dedicated for the accumulation of information towards environmental issues. Current news apps push aside the bigger issues and create emphasis on political or negatively perceived topics to garner attention that could be better fit towards more important issues. Creating an entirely new platform to specific address news on the environment and nature can allow the audience to find information more quickly.

What it does

Our app's first goal was to establish a familiar, clean, and impactful news interface. We’ve designed the landing page to resemble well-known news sites like CNN or Fox News, however, we eliminate the clutter by focusing only on key environmental topics to prevent an overwhelming experience.

The second goal was to introduce features that elevate the design and accessibility of information. The Highlights section offers short videos for quick, digestible updates, perfect for users with limited time or shorter attention spans. The Moments allow companies and environmental advocates to share real-time updates. Other elements include real-time weather and air quality tracking, giving users localized environmental information at their fingertips.

How we built it

The biggest inspiration we used for this challenge was through Pinterest which doesn’t necessarily show design solutions but more so designs that are unique and intricate. Through this we were able to create more features for our platform to give it more depth and challenge ourselves to create more designs. We then were able to transform these snippets of inspiration into the actual pages we imagined through Figma.

Challenges we ran into

Time. Definitely the biggest challenge of all especially when we thought of a million ways to design one single component. It took the longest time to create the actual landing page that most of the effort went towards that as opposed to the other components that we should have also emphasized on.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Everything we put out! We did our best given our time frame and small team. This was our first time working in such a time crunch and topic constraint. Our landing page was fleshed out really well and was a combination of ideas, testing, and messing around. (I'm proud of my partner, Nate, for trying out Figma and learning new things that helped me a lot through this process - Karni)

What we learned

We learned a lot about Figma, but also about how we can come up with ideas really quickly on the spot. There were a lot of new techniques that we used when creating this design so it tested our limits on what we could do.

What's next for Spruce News

  • List feature: A feature to highlight companies with significant negative environmental impacts, providing users with information on brands to avoid in favor of more eco-friendly options. We also want to educate users on carbon credits by explaining what they are, how they’re calculated, and tracking major companies’ carbon footprints and credits purchased.
  • Subscription feature: This feature would provide a sample of what eco-focused email updates would look like, keeping users connected with the latest sustainability news and insights tailored for inbox delivery.
  • Making it come to life: Potentially programming this website and seeing how it would visually look! We could use APIs to pull data/information to fill in the given content.

Built With

  • figma
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