Sustainability

We're a small studio and that's not an excuse.

We've thought about whether a studio our size should even have a climate plan. A handful of people, a few laptops, no factory floor. Nothing we do will show up on a global emissions chart. But we grew up hearing "leave it better than you found it," and we never heard anyone add "unless you're small." So this is us trying to work that way, out loud, where you can check.

Where we stand

Our footprint isn't smokestacks. It's software.

When we sat down to figure out where our impact actually lives, it wasn't where we expected. It's not the studio lights or the occasional flight. It's the tools. Every brand we build runs through AI models and cloud servers that draw real power somewhere we'll never see. Add the electricity we use, the trips we take, and the things we buy, and that's our footprint. Small, but real, and mostly invisible unless you go looking.

We back the global goal of keeping warming to 1.5°C. We can't move that number alone. We can decide how we work.

Some of this was already true before we wrote anything down:

  • We're a 1% for the Planet member

  • We work local and buy local by default

  • We drive EVs

  • We're active in Oregon's environmental business community

Three Commitments

Plans full of good intentions are easy to write. We wanted three things we could measure, so that in a year you can tell whether we did them.

Use AI responsibly. Then educate our team and clients about it.

AI is core to how we work now, and it has a real environmental cost that almost nobody in our industry talks about. We don't want to pretend it's free. So we're going to measure our own usage, account for it, and say what we find. Then take what we learn to other designers, because the whole industry is running on the same tools.

The measurable goal: Track our AI and cloud footprint every quarter across our three heaviest tools: Notion, Figma, Grokbot and Claude. Publish what we find in an annual transparency note on this site by August 2027.

Give the work away to people fixing things.

We've been doing pro bono work for purpose-driven businesses and organizations since the beginning. It used to be a thing we did when we had time. Now it's a line in the plan, which means it happens whether or not we have time.

The measurable goal: At least 50 hours a year of design and AI work for climate and community organizations. Nonprofits, civic groups, and housing advocates. Portland first.

Keep the money in Portland.

Working local is lower-impact by nature. Fewer miles, fewer boxes, fewer strangers in the supply chain. It's also where we want our economy to grow. So when we need something, the default is to look here first.

The measurable goal: Local vendors first on every purchase. At least 75% of discretionary spend with Portland-area businesses. 100% of pro bono work to local organizations.

How this Actually Happens

Most plans like this die because nobody owns them. Ours has one person responsible for it inside the studio, as part of the job rather than a side project. There's money set aside for offsets and our 1% pledge. And we track with free tools, because we've watched enough companies build elaborate dashboards they stopped opening after month three.

Who We’ve Bringing With Us

This only matters if it changes how other people work.

A plan for a studio this small is only worth writing if it travels. So we'll talk with design students at Portland's art schools and universities about using AI without leaving the planet behind, before their habits are set. And we'll keep pushing, alongside civic groups and fellow designers, for responsible AI guardrails across our industry.

The first transparency note lands August 2027. We'll review the whole plan at least every 36 months, next in August 2029. If we miss, you'll read about it here.