Sustainability is becoming a pressing concern to the graphic design community. Designers are buzzing about it as they try to green their own practices and make sense of it all. In order to tap into this buzz, I organized a round table virtual discussion with several people involved in the design industry to chat about green design and the growing sensibilities of sustainability in our field.

"Green Design Dialogues" was born as a way to build the green design community and learn from each other. Our first discussion, via instant messaging, was May 25th. We touched on a broad range of topics relating to green design, which I will report on in a series of "Green Design Dialogues" posts in coming weeks. This week, I'll introduce the crew involved with our first Green Design Dialogue and relay each designer's experience with green design before summarizing our discussion.

Involved in the chat were designers from various backgrounds. Bryn Mooth joined us from HOW magazine, a wonderful graphic design magazine that has recently started covering more green topics. Dani Nordin, founder and principal designer at The Zen Kitchen, brought to the discussion her experience with running a small design studio that focuses on green design. Eric Benson is a Professor at the University of Illinois and the creator of the wonderful green design resource renourish. Eric Karjaluoto works at the interactive services firm smashLAB in Vancouver, and was involved in creating Design Can Change, an excellent call to action for the design community. Jess Sand is an independent designer and writer at her communications studio Roughstock Studios, who also writes a great blog on "sustainability for the rest of us," Small Failures. And of course, your humble Green Options design writer, Megan Prusynski, brought everyone together for the chat.

We started off our dialogue with a quick introduction and by sharing our own experiences with green design. Eric K began by explaining, "At smashLAB we simply started out by trying to find ways to make our studio more sustainable. Along the way, we realized that there were many like that, and as a result tried to make some information available that we could share with others in the community." Thus, Design Can Change came about from the firm's efforts at greening their own practices and desire to share what they learned.

Bryn from HOW magazine mentioned that she has noticed a shift from talking the talk to walking the walk in the design community. She said, "It seems like we're starting to move beyond the theoretical discussion of making design sustainable (a la the AIGA conference a couple of years ago) and more towards actually DOING things about it." HOW magazine has seen an increase in promotions from paper companies touting their new FSC certifications or green power usage.

Both Jess and Dani's journeys into sustainability began with their own lives and moved into their businesses. Jess mentioned that she began with trying to live more sustainably on a personal level, and started sharing her experiences because as a writer, it was important for her to do so. She also recently earned her certification in sustainable business management. Dani began her professional life as an environmental activist and discovered graphic design through her activism. She began a career as a freelance designer and noticed from places she worked how wasteful offices were and how little attention was paid to the environmental impact of projects and business practices. Her studio is now a green certified business.

My interest with green design began in college while I was studying art and graphic design and trying to meld what I was learning with my love of nature and my inner environmentalist. I wrote many a paper about design ethics and my thesis topic was socially and environmentally conscious design. However our interests in green design began, we are all now seeing an awakening in the industry and a focus on sustainability and change, which makes us green designers very happy!

Over the past few years, green designers have started out by doing their own research. Most of us had jumped into green design by simply immersing ourselves in it. Dani noted the importance of reading a lot for her, so that she knew a lot about the subject before getting started. Several of us have noticed that there are more resources about green graphic design now than just a couple of years ago, and, as Jess said: "With so much out there (some good, some junk), we're going to see a few places rise to the top. I just hope they're good ones" like renourish and Design Can Change.

Each designer's journey to sustainability is unique, and we've all had our stumbling blocks along the way. We discussed that each person approaches green living and green design differently, making different tradeoffs and decisions. It was certainly apparent to all of us that our industry was changing, and the green design movement was certainly getting traction. Eric K suggested that the surge of interest in green design stems from An Inconvenient Truth. What began as a grassroots movement has become a mainstream dialogue that is leading to action and change.

Businesses have begun taking an interest in sustainability as a strategy and a competitive advantage, and sustainable options are something designers are starting to offer their clients. Designers and communicators are taking responsibility for their work. We all agreed that sustainability was very important for the design industry because creatives are the makers of many things and communicators with many people. We are responsible for putting messages out there, we have the power to communicate, educate, open minds, or incite change. Graphic designers also use a lot of paper. As Jess pointed out, "Paper use has increased 20-40% since the advent of the paperless office." Dani mentioned her aversion to creating direct mail pieces since the beginning of her career.

Overall, people are beginning to take responsibility for their environmental impact and be more conscious of what they can do. As Eric K put it, "It's simply an issue of responsibility. We don't drive recklessly, and we shouldn't be living so either." Many industries are making changes as they learn more about environmental responsibility. The paper industry has recently made a huge push to go green and the design industry is changing along with it. The momentum is only going to grow from here… and designers will certainly play a role.

In the next post on Green Design Dialogues, I will share more about our May 25th discussion. We discussed the next steps for green design, working with clients towards sustainability, paper and beyond, and ideas for spreading sustainability within the design industry and the world.

Sustainability has become a buzz word in the design industry. Graphic design industry magazines such as HOW and Communication Arts are publishing articles (and even entire issues) devoted to green design regularly. Designers are starting to pay attention and change the way they work.

Sustainable and eco-conscious design has been a long time in the making, but the proliferation of web sites and resources on the subject in recent years and months shows that momentum is building. One growing resource, AIGA Center for Sustainable Design, represents, to me, a benchmark in the green design movement.

AIGA, the professional association for design, is a major force in the design industry. The fact that they have begun paying attention to green design represents a big step in the right direction. AIGA is the oldest and largest membership association for professional designers. Accordingly, designers tend to pay attention to AIGA, and hopefully to its sustainability resources.

 The Center for Sustainable Design provides a discussion forum, green design news, event information, case studies, and information on sustainability all in a well-designed, easy to digest web site. The site has grown from almost nothing to an invaluable tool for any designer concerned with sustainability. AIGA describes their mission in creating the site:

The AIGA Center for Sustainable Design is dedicated to providing designers with practical information regarding sustainable business practice. Through case studies, interviews, answers and discourse the Center will encourage and support designers as they incorporate sustainable thinking into their professional lives.

Sustainability is a growing concern for many designers. Accordingly, it will be examined from a wide range of perspectives: from the nuts and bolts of daily studio life to the larger marketplace dynamics and global concerns within which designers operate. This will be accomplished primarily through the community website, conferences and an online forum.

Currently the site has definitions of sustainability, downloads, industry news, and a great article on 11 questions to ask before you design, specify, or buy anything. You could literally spend hours on this site, which gathers many useful readings and web links in the resources section. New articles and features are being added every time I visit, so it's definitely one to bookmark and return to often. I hope that the Center can continue to serve as a comprehensive database. With the growing popularity of green design, it's good to have a solid resource to bring it all together and make sustainability the norm in the design industry.

We probably come into contact with paper and paper products more often than any other material throughout our lives. Humans have been using paper since ancient times, developing it over the years to adapt to different cultures, materials, and uses. Today, paper makes up 35% of our waste stream, but only 48% of the paper products we use is recovered for recycling. That means over half the paper we use is filling up our landfills and rotting in our trash. This is a very sad fact when you consider that paper is one of the easiest materials to recycle and reuse.

As our use of paper increases, so does our need to think carefully about our paper choices and seek out the most sustainable options. Luckily, the recycled paper industry is coming of age, and there are many alternatives to virgin paper (i.e. paper made from trees). As a graphic designer, I use paper to communicate my clients' messages (when I can't convince them to do so over the web, that is) through brochures, invitations, posters, business cards, and so on. Choosing the right paper for the project is a big part of the design process, and I make sure that no trees are cut down for my projects by making use of the many tree-free and recycled paper options out there.

With so many sustainable paper choices out there, all with varying degrees of environmental impact, it can be difficult to choose what type to use. Thankfully, there are many resources available online to make this choice easier. One of my favorites is renourish. This site is a complete guide for designers who want to become more sustainable and includes information on which types of paper are most environmentally-friendly and what to look for when choosing a sustainable paper. There are many factors to consider, such as recycled content, how the paper was processed or bleached, and what materials were used to make it. According to the renourish paper guide:

The best solution for paper selection is:

• 100% Post-Consumer Waste (PCW)
• Processed Chlorine Free (PCF)
• Uncoated
• Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) Certified
• Made by renewable energy sources (wind, geothermal, solar, etc.)
• Treeless paper like bamboo, hemp and kenaf (if readily available locally)

Celery Design Collaborative has a very comprehensive list of sustainable papers available from a variety of companies, including paper from each category listed above. Conservatree's choosing paper guide begins with a very good recommendation:

The first step in choosing paper is to evaluate how to reduce paper use so that you're only using what's truly needed.

Reducing paper use is probably the most important step we can take to save trees and resources and prevent waste. In the office, this means printing on both sides of each page, reusing all the paper we can, and simply not printing as much stuff. For instance, I send all my invoices as PDFs attached to an e-mail. The paperless office may not be a reality yet, but we can certainly move towards it by using digital documents over paper ones.

Of course, using paper is pretty unavoidable sometimes. By making sustainable paper choices and reusing and recycling the paper we use, we can be responsible paper consumers.

There are many paper companies that offer eco-friendly papers, whether they be recycled, processed chlorine free, made from renewable fibers other than trees, or synthetic. Neenah Paper offers several sustainable options, including Neenah Green Papers and the Environment line of papers. They even have an Environmental Savings Calculator so you can see how many resources you would save by choosing a greener paper. Mohawk Fine Papers also offers recycled choices and many papers produced using wind power. They also have an Environmental Calculator on their web site. SMART Papers is another large paper company with high environmental standards. Yupo and Polyart provide synthetic tree-free papers.

While the big paper companies often dedicate only part of their entire product line to sustainable papers, there are smaller companies who produce only sustainable paper. EcoPaper produces papers and stationery that utilize not only recycled paper fibers, but natural tree-free fibers from bananas, coffee, lemons, and even cigars! Green Field Paper Company produces paper that is made with a mix of recycled fibers and renewables like hemp, which is stronger and can be recycled more times than regular paper. They also make paper out of recycled junk mail and coffee, along with some beautiful cards called Grow-A-Note that have seeds embedded in the paper fibers so that the cards can simply be planted after use. Vision Paper produces paper from kenaf, a quick growing plant with a high fiber yield.

From regular office paper to fancy cardstock, there are countless options for the environmentally-conscious paper user. Sustainable papers are competitive with virgin paper in price, brightness, texture, and variety. I hope you'll consider all the environmental effects of your paper choice for your next printed project. With all these green paper choices, I often wonder why virgin paper still exists at all!