unsheltered
unshelte.red is an information portal & advocacy platform by homeless people for homeless people.
About this project
In a world where there are many strongly formed opinions about what to do about the homeless,but very little in the way of customer feedback, unshelte.red is something different, a service provider information portal and advocacy platform owned & operated by people who have experienced homelessness at some point in life for homeless people.
The idea for this website came about on the first freezing night in autumn 2024, when a homeless man in a thin jacket in the seat across from me on a train saw me working on my laptop and asked if I would check and see if city warming centers were open.
I said "sure" expecting a few seconds to google "warming centers near me" followed by directions. 25 minutes later on google plus embedded searches on the city and county websites, the best I could tell him was that warming centers in Dekalb, the next county over, were definitely open, and ATL/Fulton county centers were likely to be open, based on a two year old article on one of the local news sites and common sense intuition that it would just be chaos for centers to be open in one county and not the next one over in a city center as dense and spread out as metro ATL. That turned out to be true. It didn't save my friend from getting off the train without knowing whether he had a place to go to.
What followed is a whole thing, but the over the next few months I learned that most of what I thought I knew about the homeless safety net from years of volunteer and pro bono work was wrong and that accurate and up-to-date information about services is hard to come by, sometimes deliberately so.
Sign up for updates for a link for a future long read post about that experience
Symbol Signs
PROBLEM
Visual Clarity is in which almost 50% have some type of physical, mental or learning disability. According to the National Institute of Health, people who experience periods without shelter are 2.5 times more likely than the general population to struggle with dyslexia, vision problems, English as second language, PTSD & mental illness.
Another common problem with branding targeted at homeless and poor people is that there often isn't much money in the budget for design, and it shows up in bad typography, outdated user interfaces, dead links, broken layouts, drab colors, poor spacing.
This used to be a problem that applied to most 501 (c) (3) charity & government websites, but over the last few years, many charities have seen that the benefits of good design are worth the slight uptick in cost, particularly for those that rely on funding from wealthy donors. That same logic doesn't often trickle down to websites targeted at poor people. Contrast the slick websites for realfood.gov and the Ellen T. MacArthur Foundation with those for any homeless service provider in your city, even those with national recognition. I'm not saying good design doesn't exist, just that it doesn't often exist.
SOLUTION
In an attempt to create a universal design system, I designed a custom symbol sign set inspired by the AIGA symbol sign library and Massimo Vignelli's groundbreaking work for the NYC Transit Authority.
from licensed shareware icons from the Noun Project, which bills itself as the "The world’s largest and most diverse collection of high-quality vector icons crafted and curated by real human Creators.
and bright colors that were probably inspired by Apple's iPod branding from the late aughts.
Types were chosen for easy readability on a variety of devices, especially mobile, since that's how most users will access it. I chose non-serif fonts because serif fonts can be really difficult for the neurodivergent despite the factt that serifs are actually more legible for most people for long reads like this article. Sentences are short without being dumbed down. Humor is used generously both to lighten the mood and make a point.
The mosquito symbol is funny during summer after spending days chasing repellent from unicorn service providers listed on a brochure only to find out that "We don't do that any more" or "We ran out last week. Try…"
(They aren't all from real human Creator Luis Prado but there are enough that I'd feel weird about not crediting him even though they were purchased under a non-attribution license)
Killer Feature: the Warming Center Tool
Warming centers are often the literal difference between life and death for the unhoused. Some would say that the fact that they exist at all is cause for celebration. Others would say it's a misuse of taxpayer funding. If you can't afford a roof over your head, maybe you deserve to die. Those people don't represent my values and I have every bit as much right to insist that my values be represented with public funding as they do. Given that warming centers do in fact exist
Accurate, up to date information about whether they are open or not should be required with standardized guidelines and oversight for any entity recieving public funding or private donations, not left to random strangers on trains. Unfortunately,
Transitioning
Prior to this website, I'd prototyped websites before handing off to the development team in my work as PM, but I had very little experience building a website from scrac
Clarity that Scales with You
Every element within Damas is crafted to serve a purpose—bringing together design and function in a way that feels effortless. It empowers brands to present themselves with confidence, precision, and lasting impact.
