Craft Emergency Relief Fund
The Craft Emergency Relief Fund (CERF+) serves as a vital lifeline for craft artists across the United States, providing crucial support through readiness, relief, and recovery programs. As the leading nonprofit organization focused on safeguarding artists' livelihoods, CERF+ offers emergency relief grants, educational resources, and advocacy services to help artists prepare for and overcome career-threatening emergencies, from natural disasters to personal crises.
Project Goals
CERF+ aimed to revitalize their online presence to better serve their mission and connect with their audience. Key objectives included:
- Streamlining navigation and content organization to make information more accessible, especially for artists in distress.
- Modernizing the visual design to create a fresh, clean, and welcoming aesthetic that aligns with their new brand identity.
- Enhancing accessibility features to ensure inclusivity for all users.
- Updating content to reflect CERF+'s evolving role in the craft community and their commitment to readiness, relief, and recovery programs.
- Integrating features that highlight the diversity of craft artists and art forms CERF+ supports.
- Ensuring the new website would be easy for staff to update and maintain independently.
A Clean and Concise Structure
We worked with CERF+ and another consultant to completely rebuild the website architecture from the ground up, significantly reducing the total number of pages. Our goal was to make the navigation as clean and actionable as possible, shifting away from the "website as an archive of everything we've done" model of their previous websites. The new website feels like a breath of fresh air—concise, clear content with plenty of imagery and whitespace. No more dense pages of text or deep layers of page hierarchies.
A Design Story of Craft Artist Resilience
CERF+ has a deep archive of beautiful imagery from their craft community artists, so we designed the website to showcase the breadth and diversity of that community, from ceramicists in Puerto Rico to metalworkers in Oregon. While a significant amount of their work and grant funds go towards artists recovering from natural disasters, we decided to shift away from shocking images of these catastrophes and instead center on a hopeful story of the beauty and resilience of the craft community. We want their audience to feel a sense of inspiration and belonging.
Accessibility and Inclusion
CERF+ has a deep and longstanding commitment to honoring diversity and being inclusive of all. They sought to align their website with these ideals by ensuring full accessibility for all users, including those with disabilities. To achieve this goal, we implemented a comprehensive approach to web accessibility throughout the design and development process.
The new site adheres to WCAG 2.1 AA standards, featuring high-contrast color schemes, keyboard-navigable interfaces, and proper heading structures for screen readers. We also incorporated alt text for images and ensured responsive design for various devices. To validate our efforts and guarantee the highest standards of accessibility, we partnered with Knowbility, a respected nonprofit accessibility consultant service. Knowbility's experts thoroughly tested the draft website, providing valuable insights and recommendations to ensure the site truly serves all users, regardless of their abilities or the devices they use.
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