Creative Commons Homepage Ideation

Creative Commons

We are a global non profit organization that develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation. In our ideal world, information and knowledge are available to every person, company, and institution around the globe to use, learn from, and build upon.

To accomplish this vision, we developed a set of free copyright licenses for cultural works - like blogs, music, photographs, and more - that now cover more than 500,000,000 digital works. Our copyright licenses have become standards for making works "open" on the web. We have since expanded to provide the same legal infrastructure for patents, materials transfer licenses, web standards and others where it fits with our vision and our mission. Our core areas of work are in science, education, and culture.

We support, and steward the core licenses and public domain tools and supporting technologies across sectors and geographies, and support the users of our licenses with their technical and legal questions. We steward an international conversation among experts and users, serving as the thought leaders in the legal and technical issues around sharing, and we are proud that our formal network includes 70+ international affiliate institutions. We are looking to continue to increase adoption and the ubiquity of the Creative Commons tools and technologies.

Our audience is global and far-reaching: anyone who is creating and distributing knowledge.

One function of the website ideation is to provide ideas on how to reach artists, musicians, photographers, scientists, teachers, university leaders, lawyers, government policymakers, foundations, and more, to become users of our legal and technical tools and expand the digital commons.

A second function of the ideation is to support our audience of institutional affiliates across the world and international users. How can we make it easier for non-English speakers to access and use the tools, technologies, news, and features?

A third function of the ideation is to explore how the broader community might encounter the idea of the "digital commons" via our website, and how to explain the various layers of the Creative Commons approach to constructing the shared spaces across copyrights, patents, scientific materials transfer, data, policy, and more.

Last, a fourth potential audience is the universe of philanthropic, research, and governmental institutions that invest in knowledge creation.

The ideation should be a simple, visual design for a new Creative Commons homepage that integrates content from across the following URLs:

1. http://creativecommons.org (including the education, license, and donate functions from the front page)
2. http://sciencecommons.org
3. http://wiki.creativecommons.org

The ideation should also integrate the international content of the site, which is currently represented through the international news and the links to affiliates found at http://creativecommons.org/international

Feel free to use any and/or all of the links found on the front pages of either site.

The projects linked off http://sciencecommons.org/projects should be prominently available off the design.

The ideation should also include "chrome" - a simple template that can be applied across the interior pages of the website.

Our goal is to generate ideas and conversations about design in this process, so we encourage experimentation and artistic interpretations. If there are good entries, we will award multiple prizes.

Graphics, color palettes, and media are available from http://creativecommons.org/about/downloads/ - but feel free to try out new color schemes and graphic layouts.