When we started on our journey to understand the sustainability impact of our digital work about five years ago, the topic of Sustainable Web Design was almost unheard-of, but one name came up again and again – Tim Frick and his Chicago web design agency (and fellow B Corp), Mightybytes.

Late last year, while helping me as I was working on my new book, Tim suggested that we collaborate to launch a new version of SustainableWebDesign.org, a website that Mightybytes created about six years ago to introduce the topic to a wider audience.

We’re excited to announce that version 1 of the site is now live and you can read about our collaboration here. This is very much a living website and will evolve over time with community collaboration, so please do take a look at the resources available, and let us know what you think.

We signed up to Business Declares – a global network of businesses declaring a climate and ecological emergency – when this movement was first established in 2019. Since then, we have been working closely with the team to create a Digital Declutter Toolkit, to help introduce businesses to the topic of digital carbon footprints.

An initial version of the toolkit is now available. We’ve found it hard to provide concrete advice as to how to quantify various aspects of digital carbon footprints. This is a big hole in most carbon reports for businesses and we hope that with community collaboration, we can improve this toolkit and provide ever more practical guidance over time.

We invite you to explore the various digital elements of your business, from apps to video calls, and look at what actions you can take to reduce your impact.

Dryden Williams recently did a review of the carbon footprint of DeZeen, “the world’s most popular and influential architecture and design site” on the EcoPing website. It highlighted how DeZeen is a fantastic website for those interested in design and architecture, but as a result it has huge traffic volumes, which when combined with highly bloated pages results in a big environmental impact.

What is really exciting though is that DeZeen took it really positively and wrote an amazing article about what they had learned. It turns out that their developers had been urging them to work on web performance for a while in order to improve user experience, but it took the added environmental benefits to get them to make efficiency a priority.

The book Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro reminds us to be critical about the (online) world that we create. Mike explains in his provocative style how “the world is working exactly as we design it to work” and how we might have destroyed it. Heavy. Luckily, he provides us ways to fix it.

He shows us why we, designers, need to care about the people who are affected by our work. We can rightfully blame large companies, like Facebook, for their unethical practices, but since we design the world together, we can design it right by making ethical choices as an individual, as a community and as an organisation or company.

This angry book might make you swear, but it is a call to ethical and sustainable action. You might swear to be part of it.

– Csaba Varszegi, littlebigthings.be