Holy font fans! Ecofont saves ink (free download)

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Appealing ideas are often simple. Netherlands-based design company SPRANQ decided to see how much of a letter could be removed while maintaining readability. After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. At this size it looks like rhinestones on mary janes, but used at a regular text size, SPRANQ claims you'll use up to 20% less ink. Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans (like Verdana), an Open Source letter, and is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Free to download, free to use.

Thanks, SPRANQ!

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GAIA GRAPHICS & ASSOCIATES
...creative by nature
www.gaiagraphics.com
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The Secret Life of Paper

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Off Ramp Films and 18th Street Media teamed up for project INFORM to create this short, inspiring video about paper – how much we use and at what cost.

An American family of five sits on steps while cardboard and junk mail piles up to show how much is used every two weeks, until the people are totally obscured. They take away a third of the pile to show paper waste in England. Most of the pile goes away to show average paper waste in Mexico, where people use a fifth what Americans do.

Dr. Thomas Henningsen of Greenpeace Germany said every second, forest in an area the size of a soccer field is cut down, and globally we've lost 80% of all forests. He adds, "There is no need to make toilet paper out of wonderful, hundreds year old trees."

Germany passed a packaging law in 1991 that makes producers responsible for their packages. The first thing to go was excess packaging, like the boxes toothpaste comes in. Jars are standard sizes so they can be sterilized and reused as is, saving all the energy wasted in America to sort, crush and re-make bottles.

What we can do:

- Use less.
- Recycle everything.
- Buy recycled. If you can't find it, ask for it.
- Use recycled paper and add a line at the bottom to remind others to recycle and use recycled.
- Pay bills online.
- Copy double-sided.
- Don't print electronic files like email.
- Choose digital printing, which wastes less than commercial offset, and only print what you need.
- What else?

Best quote: "Every time a consumer picks up a recycled product, they're casting a vote for the environment." ~ Bette Fishbein, Senior Fellow of INFORM.

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GAIA GRAPHICS & ASSOCIATES
...creative by nature
www.gaiagraphics.com
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Design: How NOT to do it

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This hilarious video imagines the stop sign as designed by a committee.

Any designer who's been at it awhile will relate, but in my experience most clients are not like this. They hire us for our expertise and are not about to waste time and money over-controlling the process. Enjoy the video!

Stop! A Committee Designs the Stop Sign

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GAIA GRAPHICS & ASSOCIATES
...creative by nature
www.gaiagraphics.com
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KIDS - go outside and get into nature!

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Most kids can identify 1000 corporate logos, but know the names of fewer than 10 plants or animals native to their own backyards. It's NDD - nature deficit disorder.

Average middle-school aged children spend 30 hours a week looking at TV or a computer monitor. Outdoor educators, including the No Child Left Inside Coalition, encourage kids to get outside and experience nature face to face.

"If you sit in the classroom and open a book and say, here's the food chain, they may understand it but they don't really care," says one teacher who takes students outside for lessons. "I want them to love it! Outside, I see excitement. Their eyes open."

A recent study by the California Department of Education found that children who learn in outdoor classrooms increase their science scores by 27%.

"Why not make outside part of your classroom? If you're doing measurement, why not measure for a garden? If you're doing descriptive writing, why not go outside and look at something real to describe and use adjectives? If you're doing science it's a natural tie, but if you're doing social studies and you want to find out how this area has changed over time, how has the environment changed over time, why not use the environment as a context for that learning?"

If the kids are touching, smelling, seeing, tasting... that's the way they learn the best.

National Association for Interpretation
No Child Left Inside Coalition
California Regional Environmental Education Community
"Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder"



"In the end, we will conserve only what we love;
we will love only what we understand;
and we will understand only what we are taught."
- Baba Dioum, Senegalese ecologist

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GAIA GRAPHICS & ASSOCIATES
...creative by nature
www.gaiagraphics.com
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MPAA: "Best Practices Guide for Green Film Production"

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Film students, Hollywood producers, production crews, directors, actors! Get your red-hot GREEN FILM PRODUCTION GUIDE here!

The Motion Picture Association just announced their new guide to green procedures and strategies to reduce waste created by the film industry. The "Best Practices Guide for Green Production" doesn't actually seem to be available anywhere, including MPAA's website, but the announcement is all over the blogosphere.

No worries -- until MPAA actually produces their Guide, you can access the California Film Commission's GREEN RESOURCE GUIDE for film production, which was introduced last September. The CFC's site also has links to Green Government Sites, Green Resources, and Green Office Practices as well as Green Film Production. It's a great effort.
Back to the MPAA's announcement. The press release quotes CEO Dan Glickman saying, "A new norm is emerging in which eco-friendly practices are best business practices."

He's right on both counts. Eco-friendly practices are best business practices, simply because waste in any business hurts the bottom line. And true, most people get it now: damaging the environment is literally the same thing as damaging ourselves.

"Hollywood continues to evolve as an industry that takes environmental responsibility, individually and collectively, on the big and small screen, and behind the scenes," said Mr. Glickman. "Every major studio is getting in on the act."

Let's hope it's more than an act.

In 1990 the studios formed a Solid Waste Task Force in response to CA Assembly Bill 939 addressing the wanton filling of garbage dumps across the land. It took them awhile, but last year Paramount, Warner Bros., Disney, Fox, CBS, NBC Universal, and Sony Pictures together recycled 20,862 tons of studio sets and other "solid waste" according to the press release, which they say is equal to removing over 14 thousand cars from the road.

From smaller DVD packages to solar lights to The Red Carpet made from 95,000 soda bottles at last year's Emmy Awards, every major studio in Hollywood is collaborating to expand eco-friendly practices!

OK, good!

It's about time. According to Ecorazzi and a 2006 UCLA study, Hollywood is the grossest air polluter in the LA area, which is saying a lot. It's not all explosions and hair spray. Also cited were idling generators and idling limos, jet travel, freight. Add catering waste, habitat damage around the world, and just bad old-fashioned Hollywood excess to get a bigger, clearer picture of the damage done by the magicmakers.

I don't have a TV, but I don't hate Hollywood. I'm one of those geeks who watches the DVD extras: the story behind the story, outtakes, deleted scenes, and especially anything to do with production. Long after my partner has gone to bed, I'm checking out the shorts about CGI effects, costume design, props, sets... I love it all.

But. Hollywood is huge, excessive, over the top consumptive. The industry's impact on the planet is huge. Hollywood is also the undisputed leader in putting on the glam. Some of the studios' green efforts, praised in the MPAA's press release, were actually pretty thin relative to what they could and should be doing.

The MPAA and the studios they represent are very very anxious about copyrights, or more accurately copywrongs. They haven't given much space to green production guidelines, despite the fact that they will save money by actually practicing them. The more they do the more they save! Maybe a lot more money than what they keep for themselves when they bust Pirates of the Compactdisc burning illegal copies. I understand there are some good accountants in Hollywood who could help them figure out the ROI. 

There's just this single press release parading some small efforts towards undoing some very large damage. The MPAA doesn't provide a link to its own guidelines or mention the California Film Commission's, which were probably the catalyst for the studios jumping on the bandwagon.

So naturally I wonder about the claim of environmental responsibility, "individually and collectively." On the other hand, every litter bit helps. They can only get better at reducing their footprint, as can we all.

"Hollywood's film studios have come a long way since they started recycling in the 1970s," said Gary Petersen, environmental member of the California Integrated Waste Management Board.

"Studios' waste reduction and recycling efforts are having a real impact on reducing greenhouse gasses and they have implemented many other responsible practices that showcase how the private business sector can contribute to sustainability," he added.

Hooray for Hollywood!  No really, I mean that. 

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GAIA GRAPHICS & ASSOCIATES
...creative by nature
www.gaiagraphics.com
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True Colors in a grayscale world

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This study in gray pushes grayscale about as far as it goes in any direction, in this hectic CGI animation short from Movieola on my favorite new place to go, hulu.com.

A city in grayscale. Robots race through a maze of freeways surrounded by factories, production lines, and constant reminders to BE WHITE. When they find a giant spray can and unleash the power within, the city and its manic citibots are transformed.

True Colors is 9 mins and could use some editing, but it's a blast of primary colors. This is legal graffiti.

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GAIA GRAPHICS & ASSOCIATES
...creative by nature
www.gaiagraphics.com
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What is the SOUND of COLOR?

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A neat project by Rehab asked five music artists to create music that interprets a color, then gave the music to five directors to intrepret the music and create video. With lots of latitude the results are very different, but each one is fresh creative work.

I especially love the Raveonettes' take on black and white, and Marie Digby's "Paint me in your sunshine" song about the color yellow. Both are fabulously artistic music videos.

Watch all five here:
ColourLovers

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GAIA GRAPHICS & ASSOCIATES
...creative by nature
www.gaiagraphics.com
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