Going green seems to be the latest trend sweeping the planet. It is unfortunate that this is a trend and not a permanent lifestyle change for everyone because trends fade with time. It is truly disheartening to see McDonald’s cups and plastic Coke bottles littering our streets and our water sources. It is also shocking to know that litter is a free and shameful way of advertising. I know I’ve seen a candy wrapper lying in the grass and later went and purchased that candy. It is sad, but it is true.

Now more than ever our planet needs all of the help it can get to reduce our human footprint. I know this may sounds pretty blunt and harsh, but our work is trash! The marketing and advertising material that we are so proud of is literally ending up in the dirt! In a way, all litter and garbage starts with us. Unrecycled printed materials aren’t the only downfall of design. Have you ever considered how much electricity it takes to power multiple computers and printers? Of course you have! You think about it every time you get your electricity bill.

What can we do as designers to give back to our environment? What can designers do to keep our planet beautiful and please our clients at the same time? A simple solution to help our planet is to educate ourselves so we can educate our clients. By educating our clients we are able to teach them environmentally friendly ways to be successful.

Here are a few environmentally friendly tips for designers to share with their clients. These tips will not only help shrink the carbon footprint created by designers, but some of these tips will also help save you and your clients money!

Going green with print

Find an eco friendly printer.

1. Ideally we would like to find printers who use post-consumer recycled materials and 100% chlorine free paper. The word ‘recycled’ has somehow adopted the meaning ‘cheap’ is some people’s eyes. Many consumers think that all recycled paper is dull, grey, and not as white as virgin paper. Recycled paper that appears off-white hasn’t been de-inked. For bright white recycled paper use de-inked paper. The ink that is taken out of the recycled paper can be burned to create energy to power the paper mill or outsourced for other usages. Ironically, recycled paper is just as good, if not better than virgin paper.
2. Find a printer that uses soy and vegetable-based inks opposed to petroleum based inks.

Here are a few eco friendly printers you should considering checking out (some may even be cheaper than who you are currently printing with)

• Moo
• Greener Printer
• Print Pelican
• Green Printer Online
• pixxlz
• a local printer
• clientel systems

Going green in web

1. Use XHTML and CSS. The less code you use on a web page lowers the transfer rate over the network, which in return lessens the amount of electricity used. Learning and using XHTML and CSS will also make you a better web developer.
2. Recycle your code. By using php and javascript you can call certain images and media that appear on multiple pages of your website only one time  instead of over and over again. You can also recycle code by calling certain scripts for multiple sites that are on your server that may be using the same code.
3. Create single page websites when possible. Once again, this reduces transfer rates which reduce the amount of energy being used.
4. Find hosting services with carbon-neutral companies. Carbon-neutral companies are businesses who have measured all of the carbon dioxide they are using and then alter their work ethic to remove as much of it as possible.

Dreamhost has gone carbon-neutral. If you are currently looking for a new host or thinking about switching your hosting services you can google ‘Dreamhost coupons’ and get amazing hosting services for an insanely cheap price!

A few environmentally friendly ways to save some extra cash

1. Power your computers down nightly.
2. Replace light bulbs around your office with energy-efficient light bulbs, which also last longer.
3. Keep a recycling bin near the printer. Lets face it, we run a lot of proofs to make sure our design looks right. If you aren’t able to decrease the amount of proofs you run per project, the least you can do is recycle them!
4. Stop faxing, start emailing! I know we have a lot of old school clients who still prefer faxing opposed to emailing. Using email as an alternative to faxing will save you the cost of paper, ink, and the cost of electricity it takes to keep a fax machine running 24/7.

If you are looking for a way to slowly wean your client off of faxing I’d suggest investing in an eFax account.

How have you reduced your carbon footprint?

Do you remember your very first school project? How about the first website  you ever made a profit off of? It is a real treat to see a designer transform and evolve into a professional by taking at look back at where they started. Our early work isn’t something we should be ashamed of. It should be used as a visual timeline to monitor our continues growth and gain in our profession.

The following 18 designer’s took a trip down memory lane to dig up old design projects from their archives and were kind enough to share them. The following showcase of design work was created by designers I feel have grown tremendously from their early days and are living proof that time and experience will only better you as a designer and as a professional.

Antonea Nabors, VelvetAnt (@antonea)

This was the 3rd project I ever made in college. It was my 2nd time ever using Illustrator. I drew all of the elements in this project, but clearly had total disregard for typography and readability. By the way, the bolted border is not uneven on purpose.

Colin Wright (@colinismyname)

This was the very first magazine spread I put together, I believe in one of my intro design courses. As you can see, I was very interested in mixing scanned illustration work and computer-based design from early on in my education!

Anthony Sanders, Freelance Designer (@anthonydsanders)

This was (and is STILL live) a website for a record label I did for very cheap about 6-7 years ago.

Rob MacKay (@svgrob)

This was a site I “designed” for a friend a good few years now, who was setting up a monthly bands event for showcasing new talent within churches in the Northwest of England – I’m very, very sorry.

Lauren “LaurenMarie” Krause, Creative Curio (@creativecurio)

Type specimen poster for my Intermediate Graphic Design class, 3rd quarter

Chris Spooner, Spoon Graphics (@chrisspooner)

This magazine page mockup was created back when I worked at a local design studio while studying for my degree. Looking back the design itself isn’t too bad, but there are a few mistakes around the grid layout, margins and typography that I can point out now.

Jacob Cass, Just Creative Design (@justcreative)

Anno Domini Logo & website designed back in 2004 when I was 15 years old for a heavy metal rock band. This was my second ever logo design and the third ever website design

Shannon Farrell (@dolceshan)

This was something I made for Package Design class. We had to create a unique container for an item of our choice. I find this completely laughable now with the shiny cinnamon, horrible shadows, and the fact that the round container looks very flat

Lee Munroe (@leemunroe)

Did this site about 6 years ago (when I was 18) for a local cinema, featuring tables and even a marquee. It’s still going too. www.iveagh.com

Matt Fouty (@mattfouty)

This logo was created in Adobe Illustrator 10 on an old crappy Dell PC laptop. I’m not real proud of it, but it really reminds me of how much I’ve learned since then!

Andy Sowards (@andysowards)

Wow, This post brings back a lot of memories. This is one of the earliest things I can remember creating in Photoshop.I believe I was using Photoshop CS, and I think I was 18 or 19 and in college when this was done. The image was mostly created using Brushes(some of my first attempts at using these) and some crude and simple layering effects with some hue/saturation modifications. I remember this was the first year that I had decided that I wanted to be a web designer/developer as I created many other images similar to this. Although my early work in those days revolved around pictures of myself taken on my camera phone, and sadly most just ended up in my myspace, where I also began showing interest in HTML/CSS. So I guess as much as I hate myspace now (for many reasons) It helped me realize a lot about my interests back in the day when it was still popular . Thanks for the opportunity Antonea, and Thanks to the visitors for reading, hope you found this flashback into my life insightful and interesting and learned a little about where I came from professionally!

Liz Andrade, CMD+Shift Design (@cmdshiftdesign)

Magazine cover for fictitious magazine, Voice. There just seems to be no regard to typography or grid on this, the only thing I actually like is the image concept – but that’s about it.

Andrew Kelsall (@andrewkelsall)

This was a Billboard Design I created back at University, about 9 years ago (when I was 21). The design was part of a D&AD brief, whereby all the students in my class were to create an advertising campaign for a company called “Breeze”—an organisation set in the future who took passengers on holiday to Mars.

I still think that this Billboard Design has a good concept, however, there are many elements I would change. Firstly, I would change the font, I feel it just doesn’t fit well. Secondly, I have no idea why I had chosen to enclose the logo in a white box—and that “exclamation mark” in the top right corner…what’s that all about? Thirdly, I would take away that dire purple border. I now see that it serves no real purpose.

If I were to produce this same design knowing what I know now about design with years of experience, needless to say it would look more professional and straight to the point. I would do-away with the clutter and produce a sleeker, more coherent design.

Jeremy Jaymes, Papertree Design (@jeremyjaymes)

On the left is a drawing from a 9th Grade Art class project in which we had to use grids to recreate a photograph to scale. I believe the photograph I choose came from a National Geographic but I am not 100% sure on that. On the right is a sketch of my hand taken from a sketchbook I have save for years. I would date this sketch sometime during my college years. On a side note I never actually completed a degree. Most of what I studied while attending either fell outside of the Art department or in the areas of Art History and Film.

Kawsar Ali, Desizn Tech (@desizntech)

This the first background I created for my portfolio site http://i-exist.co.cc I just had learned how to use photoshop brush and patterns. I kind “Od’ed ” with the patterns and brush. However, still I was so happy that I created something. I struggled for days just for creating that. I am still learning from all great web designer I meet online and I still feel like I  do not know anything about web design.

Stuart Thursby (@sthursby)

My degree was in history, and one class was so mind-numbingly boring that I did almost anything except pay attention. In one class, I was playing around in Photoshop and came up with this. Pretty garbage now, but hey, that’s the point, right!

Niamh Redmond (@nredmond)

A perspective on being Irish – Digital Imaging project. This was one of the first photographs that I experimented with in PhotoShop when I was 18.

Chad Engle (@chadengle)

An awesome school piece for a newspaper ad.

Thank you all so much for taking the time to participate. I am sure many of you were blowing the dust off of your old external hard drives to dig up some of your outdated work!

Starting today through Monday, May 18th, 2009 all VelvetAnt subscribers have a chance to win a free StayValid subscription for 6 months! We will be giving away 1 premium subscription and 2 basic subscriptions. To learn more about StayValid check out this interview with StayValid creator, Nick Hand.

How to enter: To enter and win a free subscription you MUST be subscribed to this blog and viewing it through your RSS reader. Subscribers viewing this post via RSS will see a ‘Special Contest Code’ at the bottom of this article. Leave a comment on this post containing the special code in order to be entered into the contest.

Want to double your chances of winning? To double your chances of winning you must leave a comment on this post containing the special contest code, as well as sign up for a free StayValid trial account and enter the same special contest code upon request when registering for your trial account.

Contest rules:

• Must be a VelvetAnt subscriber. (Subscribe here if you haven’t yet)
• Leave a comment on this post containing the special contest code.
• Register for a free StayValid trial account to double your chances of winning (optional, but recommended)
• Enter up to 2 times only. (one time through comment and one time through StayValid trial)
• Leave a valid email address for us to contact you at.
• Contest will be closed on Monday, May 18th, 2009.

Premium subscription features:

• XHTML validation
• Scan entire domain under your URL
• Instant email notification containing your scan results.
• Scan 250 pages per site
• Add an unlimited amount of domains (site subscriptions) to your account.

Basic subscription features:

• XHTML validation
• Scan entire domains under your URL
• Instant email notification containing your scan results.
• Scan 100 pages per site
• Add 6 domains (site subscriptions) to your account.

Winners will be announced on Friday, May 22nd, 2009. Good luck!

Logos that utilize negative space effectively are always exciting and inspiring to look at. I really enjoy spotting elements created within negative space alone. Negative space is very important to any composition because it creates balance. It takes a designer’s very keen eye to be able to balance positive and negative space in any composition, and that is why it is a true talent when a designer is able to utilize that negative space to convey a message.

Here are 45 logos that I believe utilize negative space effectively:

Web standards are a hot topic when it comes to the web design/development community, and a big part of web standards is having a flawless website consisting of no XHTML errors. It is very rewarding to get the green light from W3C verifying that your website is error free.

With so many considerations and requirements a web site must live up to, the last thing any designer or developer needs is more confusion. User capabilities, browser capabilities, and the headache IE causes are enough to worry about when juggling multiple web projects, right? Recently, web designer Nick Hand has created a solution to simplify a web designer/developer’s workflow. I sat down with Nick to talk about his new web project ‘StayValid,’ which is a web application used to manage the validation of all your web projects from one central location.

Enlighten us by sharing a little about yourself.
Well, I grew up in Palmer, Alaska, and wouldn’t trade that for the world. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Digital Arts and Design from Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida – graduated at the top of my class in June 2007, and had a job waiting for me back home in Alaska. I’ve been working as a Sr. Web Designer in Anchorage ever since. No I don’t live in an igloo, yes we have cars and electricity (obviously), no I don’t eat whale blubber, and yes I know Sarah Palin.

How did StayValid come about?
I’ve become somewhat of an advocate for valid and semantic code over the last couple years. The realization of just how much time and money is spent on making corrections for inferior browsers just blew me away.

After the many facepalms, tears, fits of rage, and more tears, I began to realize the problem wasn’t so much the browser’s fault – but the fact that we as web developers haven’t pushed strongly enough for a consistent set of standards to make our lives easier. How could we possibly expect Microsoft products to behave anything like other browsers without some set rules of how certain behaviors are rendered?

Since this realization, I began spending a decent amount of time running pages through the W3C validator. This can be time consuming in itself, when running page after page, at least for the core pages of your site. It just seemed like there should be an easier way to manage the validation of your entire site, and for that matter, multiple sites. Alas, the concept of StayValid was born.

How does StayValid work exactly?
The functionality of StayValid is a very simple premise. Essentially what you’re doing with our service is creating a hub for you to store and access all your validation scans in one place, so you can manage them with an easy-to-use interface to drastically simplify the process of making your sites validate.

For example, if you are a freelance web designer, or even a small studio that makes a new site every week, you can add each site subscription to your StayValid Dashboard, it is immediately scanned and your validation results are directly accessible on a per-page basis under that domain.

Making your site validate can be time consuming, and you may not have time to get it completed in one sitting. No worries, you can just visit StayValid at anytime, log in to your Dashboard, and your site subscriptions are waiting for you to continue reviewing errors. No need to scan your site again or scroll through endless unorganized code outputs that generally are the result of current online validators. StayValid has each page’s output neatly organized by URL. You can even choose to hide valid pages so they are out of your way. There’s a nifty new feature that allows you to scan an individual page directly from the error details view, so you don’t have to rescan your entire site just to recheck validation of one page!

Can you give us a briefing of your design process for this project?
My first thoughts for StayValid were mostly functionality-based, which lead me to trying to find if there was a service that provided what I was wanting to create with StayValid. As I searched – and came up empty handed – I found the sites that provided ANY validation functionality were painfully drab and unattractive.

Not only did this reflect poorly on the use of the sites’ functionality, it seemed to create a sort of ‘old fashioned’ feel to the whole process of validating. I wanted site validation to seem current, modern, and part of the future of web design and development – which I feel it is.

So I wanted the core of StayValid to be productive and stay focused to the goal, but I also am hoping to make a bit of an impression to show the ability to put a beautiful face on the somewhat code-based tedious functionality. There’s enough difficulty in sorting through your nonsense code to make it validate, I didn’t want it to be difficult to make your way around StayValid’s interface. That meant creating a slick, clean-cut environment that is easily navigated and keeps the power of the service at your fingertips while making it an enjoyable experience at the same time.

Sell yourself, why should designers/developers use StayValid opposed to a browser validation plugin or by visiting w3.org to validate sites?
Designers and developers all know that our time is valuable. Especially when it’s spent on things like cross-browser fixes, debugging javascript, or Search Engine Optimization. There’s no need to add site validation to the list of tedious time-consuming processes we tack on to the end of a project.

Using StayValid not only keeps all your site validation results organized in an intuitive, simple environment, but adds powerful tools like the ability to automatically have your site scanned every night, have your scan results emailed to you, and individual page scans on-the-fly while reviewing page errors. Knowing you can add a few site subscriptions, leave it, come back later, check the errors, fix them, rescan, be emailed when it’s complete, is just a comfort of having that much more control over your site’s maintainability. With each scan also comes the number of pages found with our site crawler, and a list of every page found on your site through internal linking. These can also be very powerful tools in site management.

What do you want people to know about StayValid?
I’m not going to claim that there is anything groundbreaking about the technology behind StayValid. It’s just a simple, yet powerful tool that has the potential to save very valuable time for designers and developers who feel it is important to maintain site validation.

StayValid will not stop at just producing site validation output, there’s more in the works, and I’d love to hear what people think of it, and what they would like to see come in future releases in areas of functionality. What would save you more time in your site development? What tools and time-saving options do you want to see? I value user feedback greatly, and I see a lot of potential to continue growing the power of StayValid to meet needs of today’s web developers.

Along with most web applications, StayValid is fresh out of the box, so bare with them as they work out the rough patches. You can help by giving feedback about your experience using StayValid – all user feedback is greatly appreciated and will only be used to make StayValid more useful and enjoyable for you. So be patient, but take advantage of the tools it provides!

Want a FREE Premium StayValid subscription? All VelvetAnt subscribers will have a chance to win 1 FREE Premium StayValid subscription or one of 2 FREE Basic StayValid subscriptions for 6 months! Click here for more information on StayValid and how to win your own free subscription.