Company values

In my role as a designer and small business owner, I am committed to minimising the environmental impact of my work. I try to ensure where I can, that my work not only minimizes environmental harm but also actively contributes to environmental betterment. My goal is to make a positive impact, and to try to improve things in whatever small way I can.

Clients

I consciously choose not to engage with companies or organizations known for causing deliberate harm to people, animals, or the environment at large. Examples of businesses and sectors I will not work with, include (but are not limited to), the tobacco and vape industries, fossil fuel companies, the meat industry and businesses involved in gambling and pornography.

Studio and travel

I work from my home studio remotely nearly 100% of the time, meaning my travel for work is negligible and where I do travel, I prioritise the use of public transport. My business also uses 100% renewable energy.

While I don’t think EVs are the solution to everything by any stretch, as someone with children who lives in a remote part of England, a car is a necessity for us and I do own one — I drive a fully electric vehicle, which I charge infrequently using renewable energy.

Hosting

This site is hosted with Vercel. Vercel uses serverless architecture, an energy-efficient alternative to traditional servers. From my research, there are greener hosts, but not ones that offer the same level of performance and ease of use. For me I need a balance between the two to best carry out my day to day work. This said I’m always open to greener alternatives and will keep an eye on the market for better options.

At time of writing, the Website Carbon Calculator estimates that this site uses 0.30g of CO2 per page view, which is better than 67% of all other websites tested. I’m hoping to improve this further in time.

Website

This website aims to strike a balance between aesthetics and performance. The nature of the work I do means that I need to showcase my work in a visually appealing way. But I have tried to keep things as lightweight as possible and to reduce users’ bandwidth usage and energy consumption required to load the site where feasible.

The site is built with Astro, a static site generator. I’ve worked hard to progressively enhance the site so it will function without JavaScript, and to keep the site’s payload as small as possible. As there is quite a lot of motion on the site, I’ve tried to ensure that I’m respecting a user’s preference for reduced motion. There is more work to do here, but I have plans to continue improving the accessibility of the site.

Thanks

There’s certainly more I can do to improve how I work and I continue to try to find ways to reduce mine and my business’s impact. I welcome any friendly suggestions to make things better. Thanks for reading.