We first soft-launched SDD in January this year, originally with the goal of using it as a platform where we could experiment and educate the wider creative community about how creatives could implement Sustainable Digital Design practices into their own businesses.

However, the longer we sat on the idea, researched around the concept, and tried to develop our first vision of SDD, the more we realised that we could offer much more. To that end, we’re pivoting our initial SDD goal. Sustainable Digital Design will remain a hub of knowledge and information, however, the content within will now be generated in collaboration with the wider creative community. During our early days, we realised that there are a plethora of creatives out there with a wealth of knowledge of their own who we can connect and collaborate with to educate and inform the creative community about SDD best practices.

So, with this information in mind, we’ve realigned the platform to focus more on working with and sharing insights from the wider creative community, rather than just our own insights and experiments. To do this, we will feature perspectives from the greatest and most inspirational creatives, founders, and builders we can get our hands on. Our new vision for SDD is to turn it into a knowledge hub that will reach and inspire creative people across any and all categories and sectors, as well as see our peer-reviewed and written content frequently cited and shared by influential people and publications covering the space.

While we’re still early in this journey, our ambition is huge. Already we’ve met with numerous digital creatives across a variety of disciplines to understand how they approach Sustainable Digital Design, and how they’ve incorporated SDD into their own practices. In the coming weeks, we will continue our interviews as well as begin turning them into freely accessible resources to help you reimagine your own approach to Sustainable Digital Design.

Before the design and development of the platform began, extensive research was done to find out which actions should be taken to make the platform as sustainable as possible. From the system fonts to the contrasting colours and benchmarking animation techniques, the overall goal was to reduce the page weight and energy consumption.

Icons used across the platform are combined in an SVG sprite sheet so that there is only one file transfer. The non-system font is reduced to only the letters used in the platform. 

After having benchmarked the animation techniques, we chose for the best file type for this use case. The home screen animation was converted from a 158kb JSON file to a 45kb dotlottie file (a new and more compressed Lottie file type). The site is regularly checked to identify any actions that trigger excessive energy consumption/ CPU wake-ups.