Responsive Logo Design and Sustainability

A couple of years ago I wrote about the notion of “deep rollback” – meaning that processes at the end of design workflow (e.g. site engineering, web performance optimization) should be able to feed back and cause adjustments in design. https://sustainablevirtualdesign.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/virtual-hedonics-in-sustainable-web-design/ In that post, I also discussed the notion that a sustainable visual designer had […]

How does Digital Marketing Affect Web Sustainability?

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a fusion between traditional marketing, and web technology, increasingly called “Digital Marketing.” It’s time to consider this so-hot-right-now “big idea” in terms of its effect on web sustainability. Why is Online Marketing Relevant to Web Design? When we go from Marketing to Digital Marketing (DM), we immediately […]

What have we learned about Sustainable Web Design? – A summary of what to do…

This post is a summary of the various topics this blog has covered since inception, with some short, “take-home” conclusions about sustainability theory as applied to the web, games, and other interactive systems. Sustainable Virtual Design Principles Core Concept: Sustainable web design meets the current needs of its users, without compromising the ability of those needs […]

Some Green Hosting and WPO Resources

Back from the year-end holiday, and right with new sustainable web developments… The Green Web Foundation A great new resource! A key feature of Sustainable Web Design is “sourcing” – meaning that our materials should be renewable. In a virtual world, resources are services rather than physical objects, for example web hosting. The energy efficiency […]

Sustainable Design Deliverables 2: Ux Analysis

Second in our series exploring how sustainability might be incorporated into the web and related design processes for the virtual world, we consider early-stage User Experience, or Ux documents. As a discipline, Ux is relatively new, first emerging in the early 2000s with Jesse James Garrett’s classic Elements of User Experience. In this book, Garrett […]

Sustainable Web Design Deliverables #1: Design Briefs

The first deliverable we are going to consider is often the starting point for design project in graphic and web design, a “Design Brief” or “Creative Brief.” While these vary quite a bit, they have the following general structure (leaving out budgeting): Introductory Paragraph About the Company Providing the Service Client Features and Client Goals […]

Sustainable Web Design in Ux, Ui, and ID Deliverables

Let the fall season begin! Over the next several weeks, I plan to discuss how Sustainable Virtual Design thinking can be embedded in standard web documentation. While the “space” of deliverables in a web design project can be quite large, I am going to focus on those that fall in the broad categories from Jesse […]

Old Browsers and Cultural Coding

Following our discussion of the need to support IE6 for a significant group in China, let’s consider the general issue of old browsers and code. Thanks to polyfills, browsers at IE6 levels of sophistication can be “pumped up” to modern HTML5 rendering. But should we? One result of polyfilling our way to modernity is that […]

Why you may have to continue supporting IE6

Part of sustainable design thinking includes managing development effort. On one hand, the “include everyone” feature of most sustainability guidelines implies that we should support the “browser challenged” – users with old browsers or limited hardware and software (e.g. old mobile phones). On the other hand, development – and the constant maintenance required for websites […]

Ux is not always sustainable (and how it could be)

User Experience (Ux) has become an important part of web design and development workflow, and is highly effective at making websites usable by their intended audience. But does usability imply sustainability? Are there any significant points where a Ux perspective will lead the site – or the user – into less sustainable practices online? The […]