Sustainable Graphic Design

Tools, Systems and Strategies for Innovative Print Design

Wendy Jedlicka

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470640272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Graphic Design

The graphic artist's guide to sustainable design

Graphic design is frequently thought of as a purely decorative effort. Yet these efforts can be responsible for shocking impacts on natural resources just to produce a barely-glanced-at catalog or mail piece. Sustainable Graphic Design: Tools, Systems, and Strategies for Innovative Print Design helps designers view graphic design as a holistic process. By exploring eco-conscious materials and production techniques, it shows designers how to create more effective and more sustainable designs.

Sustainable Graphic Design opens your eyes to the bigger picture of design seen from the viewpoints of the audience, the creative vendor, their suppliers, and society as a whole. Chapters are written by a wide range of sustainable design pioneers and practitioners—including graphic designers, creative managers, marketing consultants, environmentalists, researchers, and psychologists—giving you critical information on materials and processes. Case studies illustrate and tie concepts together.

Sustainability isn't a fad or a movement; it's a long-term paradigm shift. With this forward-looking toolkit, you'll be able to infuse your work with sustainability systems thinking, empowering you to play your role in achieving a future where design and sustainability are natural partners.

Contributors

Paul Andre
Paul J. Beckmann
Sharell Benson
Arlene Birt
Robert Callif
Don Carli
Jeremy Faludi
Terry Gips
Fred Haberman
Dan Halsey
Jessica Jones
Curt McNamara
John Moes
Jacquelyn Ottman
Holly Robbins
Pamela Smith
Dion Zuess
Biomimicry Guild
Carbonless Promise
Chlorine Free Products Association
Environmental Paper Network
Eureka Recycling
Great Printer Environmental Initiative
Package Design Magazine
Promotional Product Solutions
Sustainable Green Printing Partnership
Sustainable Packaging Coalition

1
Making the Business Case

Wendy Jedlička, CPP
Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Sustainable Design Certificate Program
With additional contributions from:
Don Carli, Mark Randall
Ceres, Sustainable Is Good

Photo: W. Jedlička, 2009

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

—Mahatma Gandhi

Today, business and government attitudes are changing around the world. New, more aggressive laws are being written in all major global markets, and businesses are looking to free themselves from the insecurity of petroleum as their only energy (and/or product material) option. In addition, the economy and all the issues surrounding deregulated markets are now forcing companies in all industries to find new ways of doing business. As markets flail around trying to reset, the need for transparency, a key element in sustainable business practice, is becoming part of the strategy of recovery.

After standing alone for years on the moral high ground, eco-practitioners are finally seeing the shift from if companies should get into that green thing to how and how soon sustainability practices can be incorporated into business operations.

Using the language of change, businesses are asking what natural capital is and how it is spent. What economic lessons can be drawn from nature? How do market forces shape the way we live, work, and even play? How can we nurture the green thumb on the invisible hand? Today’s eco-leaders understand the interplay between producer and consumer, governments and people, stockholders and stakeholders, humans and the environment, and how all of these things interconnect and direct what and how we create.

Consumption and Renewal

The concept of birth, life, death is linear. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We view the things we surround ourselves with as having the same linear quality. Things are made, we use them, and then we toss them away. But the reality is, there is no “away.” All things we make have a life after we use them, as garbage (landfill or incineration) or feeder stock for new objects (recycling or reuse reclamation). Objects are reborn (recycled or reclaimed) and put back into the system again, becoming part of a circular pattern of consumption that imitates nature: making, using, and remaking without limit. Imagine an upwardly spiraling system where we not only refresh what we take and use but we restore what we have previously destroyed through linear consumption. To get to this level, we need to start reexamining not just how we do what we do but why we do it.

Choices, Choices, Choices

Examples of human impact on the environment abound in both recent and ancient history. The best-known one is the fate of the Easter Islanders. This group, it has been suggested, drove themselves to extinction by their own excesses and lack of planning. As we consider the choices we make each day, think about what must have been going through the mind of the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree, leaving his people no way to build, repair, or heat their homes; build or repair boats to fish (their main food source); or even get off the island. With a simple strike of his ax, he sealed his people’s collective fate.

In our lifetime, we may not be faced with this dilemma, but every choice we make each day adds or subtracts from the resources available to us tomorrow. Bad choices are accumulating like a death by a thousand cuts. Our salvation will come in much the same way: by regular people making everyday choices.

One of the most powerful ways we can have an impact is by what and how we choose to consume. What we buy reveals a lot about how we frame our own impacts. A great example is buying a perfect red apple rather than one that is blemished but just as sweet and free of chemicals needed to attain that perfection.

Nature’s Path really understands its customers’ drive for more than just a breakfast cereal. For their product Heritage Flakes they use organic grains, but they also support sustainable farming practices and biodiversity efforts.

This seemingly small redesign—“Same net weight, 10% less box”—by Nature’s Path resulted in significant energy, water, and wood resource savings. In addition to resource savings, Nature’s Path uses the box’s “billboard” to communicate with its audience about eco-issues, using text and graphics to both inform the mind and entertain the eye.

Not only does the box illustrate an attractive product plus key into potential buyers looking for more healthful choices and good taste, it seals the deal by talking about packaging-reduction efforts. “Same net weight, 10% less box” is featured on the front. Finally, someone has addressed a nagging thorn in the consumer’s side since boxed cereal was first marketed over 100 years ago: how to fill the box without leaving such a huge space at the top.

On the product’s side panel, Nature’s Path continues the discussion of packaging reduction by citing annual water savings (700,000 gallons), energy savings (500,000 kilowatts), and paperboard savings (about 1,300 trees). These are serious and significant impacts that come from a 10 percent reduction in box size. Now, along with information detailing nutrition and sustainable production practices, consumers can make an educated decision about the food they eat and the impact of that choice. By connecting with consumers on a deeper level, Nature’s Path has armed them with the information needed to know they do have a choice—and to recognize that what instinctively seemed wrong was indeed very wrong.

As we look at the decisions we make with regard to design, in order to achieve more than simply making things less bad, we have to provide ways for users/viewers to participate in the pursuit of good.

Like Nature’s Path, we need to consider all of our design choices as part of a greater contract with society. As producers of goods, a group of resource consumers whose design choices are compounded by the millions of units produced, we are charged with nothing less than the health and safety of our fellow beings. Nowhere was this contract more brutally illustrated than in the case of the Tylenol murders in the early 1980s, which showed how easily our distribution system can be compromised and how seemingly benign design choices could lead to harm.

At the time, Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Tylenol, was distributing the product using common and completely legal techniques for this product category. To its credit, Johnson & Johnson responded quickly and decisively. It not only pulled all of the company’s products immediately from the store shelves but became very active in the development of tamper-evident packaging—the norm across the pharmaceutical industry today.¹

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As designers, we’re charged with nothing less than the health and safety of our fellow beings.

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Underconsumption

It’s odd to think of not consuming enough, but this in fact is a very real problem. Malnutrition is a form of underconsumption (not having access to enough nourishment); so is lack of education (not taking in or being allowed access to knowledge). Lack of research and the foresight it enables also is a type of underconsumption (not consuming enough time to make sure the effort, project, or piece will be smart in the long run).

There are also systematic imbalances caused by underconsumption in nature. The standard mode of forest management for the past century has included the aggressive suppression of natural fires. By doing so, too much underbrush is allowed to build up. When this accumulated brush catches fire, what would have been taken care of by nature’s renewal system quickly becomes a devastating catastrophe resulting in complete destruction. More progressive forest managers have found that working within nature’s plan allows their areas to remain healthier, more diverse, and better able to recover after disturbances.

On the industry side, underconsumption of recycled goods has kept market viability for these goods out of balance with virgin goods. With few exceptions, recycled goods can be cheaper to produce than virgin goods, enjoying lower energy inputs, less processing needed, and so on. And yet, due to “low demand” in some categories, the price for a recycled option might be higher than its virgin equivalent.

As we begin to examine products and behavior with an eye to restore what we’ve been taking out of natural systems, rather than create unstable monocultures for our convenience, balance becomes key. We must look at things as a system and find ways of working to maintain all elements in harmony. To do this, we need to not rush to find the solution—one that is convenient for us but completely ignores long-term impacts.

Overconsumption

Writer Dave Tilford tackled the idea of consumption in a 2000 Sierra Club article, “Sustainable Consumption: Why Consumption Matters”:

Our cars, houses, hamburgers, televisions, sneakers, newspapers and thousands upon thousands of other consumer items come to us via chains of production that stretch around the globe. Along the length of this chain we pull raw materials from the Earth in numbers that are too big even to conceptualize. Tremendous volumes of natural resources are displaced and ecosystems disrupted in the uncounted extraction processes that fuel modern human existence. Constructing highways or buildings, mining for gold, drilling for oil, harvesting ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1: Making the Business Case
• 2: The Psychology of Graphics
• 3: Seeking Truth in Marketing
• 4: Systems Thinking
• 5: Materials and Processes
• 6: Working Smarter
• 7: Innovation Toolbox
• Index