SUSTAINABLE CONTENT

Bonsignore, the founder of consultancy Clarifying Complex Ideas, makes a case for focusing on sustainability in business content design.

The book’s first several chapters argue for the importance of sustainability to digital content strategists, explaining the outsize impact that such content has on carbon emissions in plain language. Rather than rendering her calculations in, for instance, hard-to-visualize language of metric tons of greenhouse gases or web pages’ gigabyte weights, Bonsignore breaks carbon impacts down into understandable equivalencies. For example, she effectively compares the effect of removing data-intensive elements from a website to that of removing passenger cars from a road. Clear charts and other visuals aid understanding while also providing excellent examples of clean, functional design. For strategists looking to propose sustainability initiatives to unsympathetic managers, she discusses how improving sustainability can optimize user experience by, for instance, making web pages faster to load, which can, in turn, increase customer loyalty. “If we make information clear, easy to parse, easy to understand, and easy to use, then we are reducing our energy and emissions impact,” she notes, by “minimizing the number of pages downloaded and data transferred.” Bonsignore’s no-nonsense suggestions are likely to empower employees and managers to make positive changes in the workplace. She includes a step-by-step guide to implementing a sustainability campaign, three appendices detailing global sustainability efforts, a glossary of complex sustainability terms, and an extensive, well-organized list of further resources; as such, the book is dense with useful information to which readers can refer again and again. During a time when excitement about emerging technologies often trumps doubt about potential harm, Bonsignore’s treatise is a much-needed reminder that taking care of the environment is the only way to truly ensure a future for one’s business.  

A comprehensive, easy-to-read guide to crafting more environmentally friendly content while improving user experience.