There are many different things a business can do to make itself more eco-friendly. For example, it could impose recycling as standard practice in the workplace as well as switch to an energy provider that sources electricity through renewable means.
However, you might (understandably) not have realised that even the graphics your company uses for its publicity materials can aid in reining in its carbon emissions. Here are several strategies you can follow to make your graphics green even when they aren’t, well, the colour green…
Save your graphics in energy-efficient formats
The amount of data tied into an image is definitely a causal factor in how many carbon emissions it generates when loaded on a website.
What the image itself consists of, though, is not the only thing affecting exactly how much data is at play here. You also need to think about the image format — as vector graphics and JPEGs use energy less intensively than PNGs or GIFs, despite how widespread the latter options happen to be.
Shrink your print marketing materials
Of course, it’s not only in online places, like on your company’s website and social media feeds, that your graphics can appear. You could also extend them to such print marketing supplies as business cards, leaflets and letters, such as to help create a unified brand identity.
One question remains, though: do all of those materials need to be quite as big as you had thought? Investigate whether you could make them smaller without hampering their practicality.
Avoid bleeding graphics to the edges of the paper
Yes, it might look nice for a piece of paper to show one solid block of colour — but that colour doesn’t strictly have to go right to the edges.
What you could do instead is stop just before the edges, resulting in a white border that might look like a purely artistic choice but could have been primarily chosen to reduce the amount of ink required.
If the graphic design in this instance will be printed out many times, imagine how much ink could be saved as a result of you leaving that ink-free border along all of the edges.
Use a design less likely to end up in the bin
There are various imaginative ways you could do this, but one simple idea — to help get you thinking — would be to make at least some of the design that of a voucher.
That way, the recipient would be more inclined to keep the paper or card long enough to hand it over to a member of your staff rather than simply throw it into a waste bin. The staff member who receives the piece could subsequently make sure it is responsibly recycled.
What else could persuade the target customer to resist discarding the design? Well, quite simply, a great aesthetic appeal to that design. That’s why, if your company lacks in-house graphic design expertise, you could benefit from utilising Webahead Internet’s instead.
To contact our team, just phone 01325 582112 or email info@webaheadinternetltd.co.uk.
