Lowering the Carbon Footprint of your Digital Design

Designers have a far-reaching impact on our planet's health — learn more about the small changes that make a massive difference.

The climate crisis is a distressing and complex issue that seems to permeate into every aspect of our lives — including my work as a UX/UI designer.

The agency I currently work with focuses on low-carbon and sustainability-driven web designs. But it begs the question: What can we, as individuals, do to make a meaningful impact?

Here are five things I do outside of my day job:

1) Improve the User Experience.

Let’s be honest — you know that improving the user experience should be at the top of your priorities anyway. But did you know that most UX tweaks can also lessen a product’s environmental impact?

Reducing the number of steps, clicks, and screens has the potential to make a massive change. If you cut down the user journey by 30%, you reduce your page-load emissions by the same percentage. It’s a win-win, as you get happier users too! 🥳

2) Honey, I Shrunk the Images.

Every website element has a 'weight,' and the heaviest of these—ones my frail, nerdy arms could hardly lift—are unoptimised images and practically any form of video.

What do I mean by ‘unoptimised images’? Think about the formats you’re uploading. Does your adorable photo of a turtle need to be an uncompressed PNG if it lacks transparency data? Could it be an optimised JPEG or WebP instead? Maybe you could even upload an SVG illustration of a turtle?
By following that process, you’ve reduced your turtle from megabytes to kilobytes.

Plenty of tools out there can help you slim down those pesky images. I’m a fan of ImageOptim (macOS), and various online WebP converters that can help to create much smaller files.

3) Support renewable hosting.

It’s an inevitable Thanos-snap of energy: your website or product is always going to use power. But when it does, why not opt for the renewable stuff? A good place to start is the Green Web Directory. But you never know — your current host might already be flaunting some eco-creds! 😎

4) Encourage sustainable practices from developers.

You don’t have to be a developer to be an advocate for more sustainable practices. For instance:

• Design with lazy-loading images in mind, where content doesn’t fully appear until it’s in frame.

• Recommend energy efficient Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

• Or —the best option— just get conversations started about how teams can work together to make more sustainable products.

5) Green your routine!

The time and energy you spend making something is part of the ‘carbon cost’. This can get super granular, but think about any changes you could make to your daily work to reduce the impact of the things you make:

• Buy a refurbished laptop

• Use energy efficient devices

• Work hybrid/remotely to reduce commuting

These suggestions are a little generic, because the most interesting actions you can take will be super specific to who you are and the way you work.

Is it worth it, though?

We’ve skimmed the surface of a topic that’s often exhausting and overwhelming, but don’t lose sight of the potential impact.

After making some of these changes to my personal website, the carbon footprint dropped from 1g to a teenie-tiny 0.1g of CO2 per visit. With only 10,000 annual views, this optimisation saves the energy required to make approximately 15,000 cups of tea. That could power the average British grandma for over two minutes!

Now imagine how that scales to websites that receive millions of views annually, and the numbers are staggering. Small changes, massive difference 🌍💚

If you’d like to read about sustainable art in general,

Green Graphic Design

by Emma Fanning has some wonderful, upbeat, and optimistic content.

Thanks for reading,
Tom 🐢

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