Design studio MEK slashes website carbon emissions by 67%

The redesign cut per-page emissions from 1.21 g of CO₂ to 0.42 g — a 67 percent drop — according to the studio's own audit using the Website Carbon Calculator.

Mirella Arapian, founder and executive creative director at MEK, led the overhaul after a 2022 pub-trivia contest exposed the studio's blind spot. A question asked which has the larger carbon footprint: sending 100 emails or driving 1 km by car. Her team guessed the car — and lost.

The exchange sent the studio "down a deep rabbit hole," Arapian wrote.

What did the audit find?

The previous MEK site emitted more carbon than 76.5 percent of web pages tested by the calculator. At roughly 10,000 monthly page views, the studio's home page released about 145.6 kg of CO₂ per year.

The diagnosis was blunt. The homepage carried seven full-screen images, video, and animations averaging around 8 MB per file, with still images near 700 KB. Every kilobyte travels from a server through networks to a user's device, and most of that infrastructure still runs on fossil-fuel-generated electricity.

MEK called out its own contradiction: a studio with a reputation for "radical brands in environment and tech" was running a marketing site that drained resources.

What did the studio change?

MEK treated emissions as a creative constraint, not a technical limitation. Key moves included:

• Replacing high-resolution JPGs with resized AVIF files
• Removing nearly all motion and video from the home page
• Simplifying navigation and trimming content
• Switching the interface from white to dark mode
• Swapping typography from Dinamo's Monument Grotesk to system font Arial — then to Google Fonts after the brand suffered

Typography produced the sharpest trade-off. Monument Grotesk required an extra font download. Arial ships with the user's operating system.

"It was technically efficient," Arapian wrote. "It was also Arial."

The studio later moved to Google Fonts, accepting a small energy penalty for a typeface that better served the brand.

Arapian framed the trade-off as a working principle: "Low-carbon design is not about making the lowest possible number at any cost; it is about understanding the cost of our decisions and what is worth it."

What do the numbers say now?

After launch, the studio re-ran the audit. Emissions fell to 0.42 g of CO₂ per page view. The 67 percent drop translates into a parallel cut in the site's annual footprint at the same traffic level.

Why should designers care?

Arapian argues the profession has conflated more with better. "We have become very good at adding things," she wrote. "Another animation, another interaction, another font, another video, another slideshow."

She insists low-carbon design is not a bid for austere pages. Constraints, she argues, force sharper ideas. "When you cannot rely on spectacle, you have to ask what actually communicates."

MEK has published the full case study, including audit method and emissions breakdowns, at mek.studio. Arapian's stated next move is to apply the same carbon framework to the briefs she pitches to clients.