Green Report Card

School is all about grades, and grades come on report cards.
But grades don't only go to students. They also go to entire schools.



greenreportcard.org rates college campuses according to their green sustainability - how well the school is doing at being eco-friendly.

It rates in the following areas:
Administration, Climate Change and Energy, Food and Recycling, Green Building, Student Involvement, Transportation, Endowment transparency, Investment Priorities, and Shareholder Engagement.



The website allows you to search for schools and compare them with other schools, assuming that students looking for colleges will want to consider how a potential college is doing green-wise, and make that a large part of their decision.

IUPUI isn't doing so well, but at least it's doing better this year than it was last year.
Although this is a good idea for a website and would be a useful resource for people trying to raise awareness about the environment, I don't think it is realistic for them to assume it is aimed at potential college students. Not very many people will base life-changing decisions about their education and future careers on how well a certain place is doing environmentally. There are a few, but not many. I think this website's main audience should be researchers and environmentalist propagandists.

Another good feature of this website is that it shows how well a school did the year before. It has a very nice layout and presents information quite simply.

Gangplank

Gangplank is a website that urges people to work toward building a new and better economy. It supports the environment, sustainability, and the community in much the same way as Bill McKibben's book Deep Economy, which is the common theme book at IUPUI for the next two years.


It has a good message. It has great goals. The website is set up to support events, which is a good feature. It is innovative in that it teams up with local artists and musicians to get credit. It works to get people informed and involved in changing the community, the economy, and the environment.


But something about its design just doesn't make sense. It's not the dark look of the website - it's perfectly find to steer away from the typical "green" look. It's not the nautical theme. It's that the main font is cartoonish. And at the same time, the website's logo is a skull. It's all right to go against the typical look, but at least pick just one direction.































Design can break rules and boundaries, but it should not break consistency. It's true that the skull looks cartoonish, like the font, and that the skull matches with the nautical (and possibly pirate-like) theme. But the font looks like something out of a bubble gum ad. I would make the font match with the rest of the site.