Our Site Commitment
Our website offers a significant platform for us to introduce ourselves to the world, a digital expression that aligns with our carefully considered new identity and brand personality, showcasing who we are and what makes us different.
It also provides us with an opportunity to demonstrate something we’ve always believed: that there is a better way to do digital.
With a new written manifesto serving as a compass and a challenge, our website has to reflect our bold mission to create safe, ethical and valuable digital experiences that work for everyone and do no harm. This page outlines our commitment to that mission, and the decisions we have made and will continue to make towards it.
Accessibility
In our manifesto for change, we commit to making accessibility foundational to all the experiences we create.
Digital accessibility is about removing the barriers that prevent anyone from using websites and apps. As you will read in our accessibility statement we prioritise the user when we ensure we work to the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA. This makes accessibility a central part of how we work and our culture, and means that the experiences we create are always clear, consistent and accessible to the majority of users.
Our website is currently compliant with WCAG 2.2 AA, meeting every testable success criteria. We have also taken additional measures to ensure we follow AAA criteria. However, we could go further. The notable area where we are choosing not to conform to AAA is contrast. To conform with the highest level of accessibility standard, digital products are required to have a contrast ratio of at least 7:1 for normal text and 4.5:1 for large text. But this failure to meet AAA on contrast is not an oversight – it’s a conscious decision.
It is through colour that we manifest some of the main elements of our brand personality, making it a key part of our visual expression. Our palette is purposefully vibrant. From the bold 'lava' red embodying our fierce determination, to our vivid 'lime' green conveying energy and inspiration, and our bright 'lilac' purple bringing tranquillity and wisdom, vibrant colours will always have an impact on the contrast we can achieve when used for text and/or backgrounds. To achieve a 7:1 contrast ratio, we would need to use colours which wouldn’t feel like manifesto, and would compromise how we could present ourselves to the world.
Motion is also a key part of our brand identity, and is consciously used throughout the site to enrich and enhance the experience and convey our personality. We understand that to ensure we follow WCAG 2.2 AAA criteria, having an experience that prevents animation being displayed is crucial, but we feel that without animation, we can’t fully embody our personality and our vision as the digital experience agency for changemakers, in restless pursuit of a better world.
Our challenge to ourselves is to make our site as accessible as possible, so we are committing to create a version of our site experience that conforms to WCAG 2.2 AAA. This option will be available to all users upon visiting our website. It will present the same content while featuring enhanced contrast and pause motion elements. Whilst compromising our brand expression slightly, we will be presenting ourselves through the content on our site in a way that an even greater majority of users can experience. The design of this experience will be baked into the way we develop the next iteration of our website as a primary consideration – in the same way that we consider different screens, devices and browsers.
Sustainability
Our dual-approach to accessibility levels, giving users control over how they experience the site, will not apply to how we approach sustainability. We have committed to making the planet a stakeholder in every one of our projects, including this website. But there is no room for compromise when it comes to building sustainable solutions – they must be low carbon by default.
This means making purposeful design decisions and technical choices that promote efficient delivery of content, with a primary goal of creating an engaging, beautiful and sustainable experience.
Design decisions
We pay careful consideration to the use of images across the website, ensuring they are always relevant and useful to the content. In future we may also give users control over whether or not they want to display images in certain situations (e.g. blog posts) therefore loading the lightest possible version of a page in the first instance.
At launch our website contains no rich media, but video is likely to be part of future iterations. As such, we are considering how we can reduce the impact this has on page weight and initial load – from thinking about where and how we are hosting video files, to using clickable thumbnails that users must interact with before fetching the video.
As a digital-first brand we have made a number of decisions in our visual language with the planet in mind. We’ve kept the number of fonts and variations to a minimum to avoid users loading multiple font files, and selected colours that work well with darker backgrounds, reducing power consumption on devices. As we develop our brand and website, we are setting rules and guidance around usage that will ensure these considerations are always part of our output.
Technical decisions
We are approaching this by looking at hardware efficiency, energy efficiency and using energy more intelligently as noted by the Green Software Foundation.
In terms of hardware efficiency, we have chosen a serverless architecture and headless content delivery to provide compute on demand rather than always on. By using serverless, we can statically generate our content ahead of time and deliver to our users via a content delivery network (CDN) bringing additional caching and security features. We’ve chosen to host our website in the UK, which is close to our users therefore reducing the distance of travel for data. Added to that, we’ve opted for only one active environment during development so that we only introduce them when necessary.
In terms of energy efficiency, we are optimising our images into appropriate sizes and making use of newer image formats to ensure they are smaller in file size. From a design perspective, we are reducing our use of images with sustainable design choices, adding colour and SVGs for design impact instead, and these are being loaded when the user starts to scroll and interact with them. We are limiting the use of third parties and additional dependencies on our website, to reduce the transfer of data required (see our privacy policy for partners used). And we will be reviewing our content on a regular basis, to ensure it’s relevant and still required for our audience.
In the interest of transparency, and as a challenge to ourselves, we are making a commitment to ensure all pages of our website are less than 1MB data transfer, which we are roughly equating to a target of below 0.5g CO2e per new visit, by using CO2.js to translate page weight to website emissions. As it stands, running our homepage through WebPageTest carbon control, data transfer is 305 kB, and CO2e per new visit is 0.11g. We’ll be using a combination of these tools to verify these metrics on release, and aim to keep these as low as possible for future iterations.
Note that since the above results are based on transfer size, whilst it is a helpful metric to measure our impact, there are limitations and we will be looking at ways in which we can improve our calculations and better understand emissions from a hosting sense too.