Italian design duo Formafantasma has unveiled a pared-back website designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Designed in collaboration with Italian agency Studio Blanco, the website features small images, basic typefaces and a logo created from standard Unicode symbols.
Visitors can choose to switch to a dark mode with a black background instead of the default white while the home page features a simple table of contents without images.
All these features require less energy to load on computers and smartphones, reducing carbon emissions.
The site is hosted by GreenGeeks, a platform that uses renewable energy to power its servers.
"It started from a personal urgency and questions we had about pollution connected to the internet," said Formafantasma founders Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin. Website visitors can change their preference
"We all know that when using digital tools we are consuming energy and emitting CO2 emissions," they continued.
"We felt it was an excellent design task to use new, more sustainable parameters as limitations for the website."
The website's spartan homepage is visually and functionally influenced by Wikipedia.
As larger images require more energy to download, the site initially loads small images that users then have the option to enlarge if they want.
The website's visual language was informed by pared-back early websites but was chosen to be energy efficiency as opposed to following graphic design trends....