Last night I attended the AIGA Colorado Green Salon, it’s a free AIGA event featuring speakers that are leaders in the Green Design/Sustainable movement. It was my 1st time attending. Cindy Hanna of Hanna Design was the speaker, her agency did the DNC Green Logo.

Logo developed for the DNC convention by Hanna Design

Here a few things I learned, some of which may be elementary to some of you but interesting to me anyways.

Hanna mainly talked about their journey to green design, paper and ink choices, and adopting a sustainable design approach. Her agency is part of the Designer’s Accord, which “is a global coalition of designers, educators, researchers, engineers, and corporate leaders, working together to create positive environmental and social impact.” Mainly they integrate a sustainable philosophy throughout the design process, from conception to production. This was the first I’d heard of of this organization so I was excited to hear something like this was out there. You can check them out via the link above.

Ms. Hanna also talked about paper and ink choices. Primarily she said they choose papers with a high recycled content. A rep from Mohawk was at the event and addressed the question of why there aren’t more papers with alternative fibers in them such as Bamboo? She said that was because mainly there is in an inconsistency in supply—so they can’t always get the raw materials to make the paper. Sounds like someone with a Bamboo farm in the states could make a killing…

As far as ink choices she favored soy inks whenever possible as did the Mohawk rep. but Hanna conceded that sometimes even if she specs soy inks there’s no way to really tell if that was used by the printer. But both agreed any small step you can make will make a difference. Someone had heard that Pantone inks have a vegetable content now and that really for the cost of Pantone vs. Soy you don’t really make much of difference, but again both the Mohawk rep. and Ms. Hanna dispelled this, since Soy is all vegetable based and there is still some amount of petroleum in the soy inks.

Ms. Hanna thought typically is doesn’t cost the client more to use sustainable paper and ink choices and also found that most of her clients were very receptive to greening up their marketing. As far as online vs. print, it depended on the target market, the goal and needs of the client, and etc.

One other thing I had never thought of was coatings. There’s really not much of a way to get around this, because of the toxicity and VOC content. Aqueous coatings were favored more because they are lower in VOCs.

PIAMS, here in Denver is starting to promote it’s “Green Member” program.

Companies posted as Green Members are:

Well that’s about all I got, if anyone has anything to add, please do so as I’m interested in learning more about paper and other ways to create more sustainable designs…