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?

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.

Web developer extension

This add-on is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and offers many features that make web design and development fast and easy. The web developer extension has an assortment of useful features such as image and color manipulation, over 6 types of page validators, and customizable browser resizing settings that are all usable right in your browser. Learn more about this add-on and install it.

Html Validator

The Html Validator add-on installs a convenient little icon in the bottom right of your browser’s status bar. It has a self explanatory icon legend that tells you if your html is valid by displaying a green check mark or if it’s invalid by displaying a red x. By simply double clicking the icon all of your errors are located and highlighted. Suggestions are given on how to correct any of your coding mistakes. So small, yet so useful! Learn more about this add-on and install it here.

MeasureIt

Easily measure any window, division, or element accurately to help fit your design. This add-on installs a ruler icon in the bottom left of your browser’s status bar that you can activate and deactivate by a single click. MeasureIt makes it very simple to measure anything you may need to measure on the web. Learn more about this add-on and install it.

Dummy Lipsum

Quickly generate Lorem Ipsum text. This add-on makes it simple to test input fields for forms, as well as testing blog layouts that text may not be available for yet. Learn more about this add-on and install it.

Delicious Bookmarks

Make it easy to visit and manage any of your delicious bookmarks right through the built-in Delicious toolbar. As designers, we are constantly browsing the web for quick fixes to get our sites looking great in internet explorer and reference sites to keep our code clean. Conveniently locate all of your designer reference pages right through your Delicious Bookmarks add-on. Learn more about this add-on and install it.