Creating a Festival, the Climate way
The Highlands & Islands Climate Festival is a work of co-creation. Facilitated by the Highlands & Islands Climate Hub the festival is the work of community groups throughout the region. The working group consisted of community led organisations from Orkney to Fort William, working together to celebrate our places. While creating the festival we wanted as a group for the branding, look and feel of the festival to be truely reflective of our region as distinct places and also of the work being carried out here in the Highlands & Northern Isles. How we put all of this together is really important to us, so what did we do?
Low Carbon Website
This was our starting point, we knew that the Highlands & Islands Climate Festival needed to create its own unique brand and would need a website for all of the fantastic events that would be listed for the month of September. Websites have a carbon footprint, we don’t always think about these things, we might think about the laptop we are using, the electricity used in charging it, the components having a carbon footprint. Once it is unpacked, connected and we log on do we think about how we browse? An average website produces 4.61 grams of CO2 for every page view. For websites that have an average of 10,000 page views per month, that makes 553 kilograms of CO2 per year.
We wanted to avoid this, but how to make our website as low carbon as we possibly could? The answer lay in avoiding hi res images and photography while also keeping graphics to a minimum. Did you know that even the fonts you use on a website can contribute to the carbon load? Using fonts that are default to all operating systems and mobile devices will lower the carbon load of a website as it doesn’t need to work harder to download the fonts and make it viewable to you.
You might be wondering why at this point? Surely you plug in, switch on and it is all there? Well yes it is but websites need to be hosted somewhere. As magical as the internet is in bringing data to us quickly and easily (well, most of the time!) requires huge data centres with banks of servers that use both energy and cooling to make them work. They are hugely energy consumptive.
Use of illustrations
The next question for us once we realised that we needed to strip everything back was how could we have a festival website and all of the other branding needed without colour and showing people, aren’t community festivals after all about the people? Illustrations were the answer. We took inspiration from several environmentally conscious brands who have stripped back branding and chose to work with a Highlands & Islands based illustrator Aimee Lockwood on putting together a suite of climate action themed illustrations for us to use throughout the site and our branding. Aimee has done an amazing job in creating illustrations for every form of community led climate action we can currently think of and has worked with our website designer Kirsty M Design to put everything together for us. Quite honestly both of them have the patience of a saint!
What about colour?
We feel that this is exactly why Kirsty and Aimee have the patience of saints! Colours! Oh my days, colours. You can’t celebrate a festival without having colour and the colours took us a long time of planning. We wanted colour to be splashed throughout the illustrations and branding that was representative of the places that we live. This took us some time. We have literally poured over images of the natural world of the Highlands & Islands to find just the right blue to match the sea & sky. Just the right green to match the trees, mountains, peatlands and fauna. Even more time trying to match - including out with eyedroppers over wild flower images - the yellow that you find in wildflowers, gorse (or whins depending on where you are from!) If that wasn’t enough then how do you find the right shade of pink to match the brambles and more wildflowers, that was out with the eyedropper again to find the right colour. It has been a real labour of love, careful thought through involving many, many teams calls to get just the right colours that worked together.
What else is low carbon?
Kirsty, Aimee and us! We even thought about how we connected with them. Our first meeting with Aimee, she walked to our office. She was that local to us. Both are based in the Highlands and that was also important to us. We aim to think local in all of the suppliers that we work with so being able to contract people to put together this labour of love with us from our region was very important to us. No intensive travel, nothing being sent for miles and community wealth building as a result.
We’re delighted with what we now have, we have branding in place which is sustainable, low carbon and we feel will stand the test of time. We hope you enjoy it too and love seeing the beautiful illustrations pop up on your screens throughout this September.
