After one Australian branding agency discovered its website produced more carbon than the average webpage, it redesigned it to be more efficient. In the process, the agency learned something about striking the right balance between sustainability and style.
MEK is a Melbourne studio that’s worked with clients like the conservation groups WWF Australia and Sea Shepherd. During a trivia night in 2022, its team learned that sending 100 emails has a bigger carbon footprint than driving one kilometer (five-eighths of a mile) in a car. That surprising statistic led the agency to audit its own website and learn that it produced more carbon than 76.5% of web pages tested on the online Website Carbon calculator.
Websites can be made more sustainable by design, and there are even some digital fonts that use less energy than others. Digital technology is estimated to account for 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions, according to the Shift Project, a think tank. Reducing that through a more sustainably designed web is not just better for the planet, it’s a faster experience for the user too.
To go about redesigning its website, completed in 2023 and updated this year, MEK first examined what was making it score so poorly on the carbon calculator. The agency’s homepage had a looped slideshow that included seven full-screen images and white backgrounds that looked clean but were more energy intensive than dark mode. It also found unnecessarily duplicated HTML tags that slowed the site down.
There were several changes MEK could make to its site, but some came with aesthetic considerations—no small matter for any branding, creative, or design agency that uses its web page to showcase its taste and personality and wow and inspire potential clients.
For MEK, striking the right balance between efficiency and design considerations was especially tricky when it came to font selection.
Agency employees tried different fonts, shifting from the smart, confident sans serif Monument Grotesk to Arial, an overused sans serif disliked by designers and type snobs but widely available. Fonts like Arial that come in default mode on Macs, PCs, and smartphone operating systems use less energy because when you visit a web page that uses them, the browser doesn’t have to make additional requests to servers. The problem for a branding agency, though, is that it looks basic.
“The most sustainable fonts are the system fonts already installed on devices because they don’t need to be downloaded, which uses less energy and therefore produces fewer emissions,” says Mirella Arapian, MEK’s founder and executive creative director, who led the project. “However, these fonts offer less typographic control and are generally less expressive. Making them work well involves a high level of experience, and even then, they may not deliver the character a brand needs to be distinctive.”
MEK now uses Zalando Sans, a Google Font. Google Fonts are widely used and efficiently served and cached by web browsers. And many of them are created by reputable type foundries.
The agency also cleaned up its duplicated HTML tags, set the page to dark mode with white text at 87% opacity, and improved the efficiency of its images.
MEK’s carbon performance has improved, from producing more carbon than 76.5% of web pages tested back in 2022 to being cleaner than 74% of all web pages globally in 2026, according to a review on Website Carbon calculator.
Arapian says MEK has incorporated its carbon-centered redesign learning into its work with clients, educating them about the environmental impact of their digital footprint and giving them the information they need to make informed choices.
“When we first set out with this project we wanted carbon emissions to be as low as possible, but through the process we realized that the goal isn’t to eliminate everything just because it has an environmental cost, but to be honest about whether it earns its place in the overall experience,” she tells Fast Company.
By making informed design choices, web designers can deliver an internet experience that’s more efficient and looks good too.