OK, so there isn’t a single easy answer to what designers and marketers can do which will save the planet, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t helping. I must be getting a piece of junk mail a week from Virgin Media since they put their magical cables down our street.

Other offenders are LoveFilm who constantly persist in harassing me to join even though I am already a member, and British Gas, who have sent us 3 boxes of low energy light bulbs whilst raising our bills at the same time by a staggering amount. Barclays are also so desperate for me to take out a loan with them during a time of economic meltdown, that they send me an envelope full of tripe at least once a month which I promptly tear up and recycle.

Maybe there really is no hope.

Marcel at Provokateur let me know about their latest project, a really fun and insightful look at tackling climate change. Watch the video and keep an eye out for the book in June.

Al Gore wins Nobel Prize for not using PowerPoint

OK, well not quite, but there should be a prize for that. Al Gore has actually been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for their work on raising awareness of global warming and climate change.

Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth was mainly put together using Apple’s Keynote application, the company’s answer to the evil that is Microsoft PowerPoint. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, as in addition to Keynote obviously being superior to PowerPoint, Mr Gore is actually a member of Apple’s Board of Directors.

An Inconvenient Truth was a great documentary film and has just this week been cleared to be shown in UK schools, on the condition that the audiences are made aware of nine scientific errors in the film, and have it made clear that there is “a view to the contrary”…

Apparently, now he might actually make it to the White House, perhaps he’ll install iMacs in the Oval Office.

There was an environmental design conference in London this week, Applied Green. I thought these two articles were particularly interesting, as I’m guilty of plenty of the sorts of green crimes they mention…

At Noisy Decent Graphics, Ben Terrett says I’m a designer, use me better – with a little help from Kermit the Frog…

In Leaching it of any meaning, Michael Johnson of Johnson Banks asks “What can design do? How can branding help (or hinder) climate change?”

Apart from attempting to specify environmentally friendly paper stocks at every available opportunity, and a naturally straightforward approach which tends to create less pages / folds / packaging, I’m not sure what I’ve been doing to be green through my work, I’ll definitely have to factor it in to every project. After all, the above articles show that there is always an environmental impact to even the most seemingly simple decisions…

Food for thought…