Delight the visitors of a non-profit site with a polished and contemporary look

Manzana Mecánica

Manzana Mecanica is a not-for-profit, ad-free, volunteer-operated, free-content-licensed, collaborative website in Spanish about Free Culture and Social Innovation. It has been around for almost 10 years!

Free Culture refers to a movement seeking to free the arts, literature, and science from the excesses of copyright, patents, and other intellectual property laws. Social Innovation are inventions and technologies designed to improve society in some way.

http://manzanamecanica.org/

We want to keep our current isotype, which is an hexagonal apple, and might want to keep our logotype with its current (Bauhaus) font (but we are open to suggestions). Adobe Illustrator files for these are attached as a .zip.

Everything else is open. For instance, we can be flexible regarding changes in colors, which currently in some way represent the colors of red apples and green apples.

We are looking for a design that:

1. Looks very modern, new, and up-to-date in terms of design.

2. Looks like a good nice and modern magazine (not like a simple blog).

We would like to see a design with a careful usage of free fonts such as the ones offered by Google Fonts, with a nice layout with reasonable amounts of spacing.

FRONT PAGE

Mandatory elements in the front page are obviously the latest articles, the most read this month ("Recomendados del Mes"), recent comments ("Comentarios Recientes"), how to contact the editor ("Editor de Turno"), and some prominent links to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and via RSS.

Optional elements in the front page include news from other websites ("Noticias", which are obtained automatically via RSS), a quote of the day ("Citas Citables") and some details in the footer about who we are, linking to our about page.

ARTICLE PAGE

The article page should ideally provide a very easy to read interface for articles that usually have somewhere between 3 and 10 paragraphs.

Mandatory elements in the article page are obviously the body of the article, in a very clean, easy-to-read format, 2 or 3 related articles that we usually pick by hand, a block with information on the author, links to share in social media (perhaps at both the top and bottom of the article), and a thread of disqus comments at the bottom.

Optional elements in the article page include the most read this month ("Recomendados del Mes").

Please make it clear we are not related to Apple, Inc.

Please do not use paid fonts or anything that doesn't have a free and open license.

Every week, our typical articles are about places where you can legally download free movies and books, collaborative and participative literature and art, changes in laws around dissemination of science, awareness about secret trade agreements affecting affordable access to medicine, initiatives of transparency or open government data, campaigns against threats to privacy, etc.

Our mission, in the bottom-left footer, is to "promote the free flow of culture and knowledge, and collaboration as fundamental aspects to the development of mankind, helping the public and decision makers understand and assimilate this technological and social evolution in a way that is beneficial for everybody."

This is a website about the effects of technology in society, not a website about flashy technological toys for grown-ups. We don't review the latest iPhone ;-)