The opening speaker at the 2010 EDUI Conference was David Berman. His passionate and informative presentation got me thinking about web design in a totally new way.  I’ve  been ecology aware since the 1960’s/70’s  but have been very frustrated at how long it’s taken to get much ecology-friendly, green, sustainable, etc, etc, processes in place for the average person.

I’ve always done my best as an individual by recycling and using environment-friendly products but I’m only one person – a very small drop in this very large ocean.

But David Berman got me thinking and I very quickly found a way to further his ideas for designers and sustainability for more than just me.

He was talking about eco-friendly fonts and logos that use less ink.  As a web designer, I’ve never even thought of that as part of my job. Sure, I create print stylesheets and use programs that have print stylesheets, but I’ve put no thought into it or even really cared – til now.

I never print web pages.  If I’m looking for something, I’m more likely to bookmark or copy the text that’s applicable.  I’ve always wondered about these folks who print out entire websites; I’ve had them walk into meetings with page after page of paper!

“What a waste of paper and ink”, I thought.”How foolish- they must go thru tons of ink in their office!”

Not once did I think how I could affect that.

Now I’m thinking.

I’m a Zen Cart developer. Zen Cart comes with a print style sheet that I, up til now, have never even opened.

So what would people want to print on an e-commerce site? I can think of several things easily, product information, product lists and information presented in the define pages and the EZ pages.

First of all, I’m thinking that printing out the product information would be the most desired. So with that in mind, I opened print_stylesheet.css.  The good news for sustainability is that the side columns are not set up to print and the body background is set to white.

The bad news is that’s about it. So I printed a page on a webiste with heavy background graphics. And voila! Only the pertinent information is printed with the logo.  The extraneous text was from added divisions placed in the header and in the footer – very little additions.

So the modern browser does not print background images by default.  It’s obviously been a really long time since I printed from the browser!

But this little experiment got me pondering client’s behaviors. How can I discourage folks from printing out web pages? So my next post will be about how site visitors can reduce their web to print footprint.