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Reducing the number of font files makes pages faster and cleaner, and helps make your designs more consistent. In cases where your project genuinely does need a wide variety of font styles, consider using a variable font. Variable fonts are designed to allow precise scaling of thickness and slant, allowing infinite variations of a single typeface to be rendered from a single font file.

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 54)

The most efficient choice is always to use system fonts that come pre-installed on devices, such as Arial, Times New Roman, or Helvetica on Apple devices, and Roboto on Android. System fonts require zero server requests and zero data transfer to use. They are essentially free. The downside is that they restrict creative freedom, and because they're not the same on every device, you sacrifice some level of control over presentation. When you do use high-impact non-system fonts, it helps to be strategic. Headings and menus, for example, tend to command much more visual weight than body text, so an eye-catching font is likely to have more impact there; users may not even notice you then use system fonts for the body copy. Other key considerations include whether your preferred typeface is available as a standalone webfont whose files you host directly, or if it's licensed via a subscription font service such as Adobe Fonts or Fonts.com. These subscription services can add extra weight to your website and make additional server requests, increasing energy consumption and slowing your site down, while also limiting the extent to which web developers can optimize the fonts, as we'll see later. The good thing about subscription fonts is knowing your fonts are legally licensed, but from an efficiency standpoint, you'll probably want to avoid subscription fonts where possible and host your own. Just be aware that the licenses on some fonts do limit modifications, so you'll need to check the legal terms yourself before making changes to the files. The next consideration from a design perspective is how many different fonts and weights are needed (FIG 3.12). Generally, each weight comes as a separate font file, adding bulk to the page. Do you really need standard, light, semi-bold, bold, and black? Probably not.

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 53)

You can also manually optimize vector files before uploading them to a website. Using a vector editing software like Adobe Illustrator, you can delete any unused groups and layers in the file and simplify shapes by removing any unnecessary anchor points on paths. SVGs can also be edited in a code editor, albeit without the visual user interface. If there's anything you can delete without making any noticeable difference to the appearance of the image, then you have an opportunity to make the file smaller. On our team, we found that if we do manual optimizations first and then compress the SVG file using a tool like ImageOptim, we can reduce the size of vector files by up to 85 percent without anyone noticing.

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 45)

reduced data transfer translates to energy efficiency, a key factor to reducing carbon emissions of web products. The more efficient our products, the less electricity they use, and the less fossil fuels need to be burned to produce the electricity to power them.

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 24)

web services are frequently designed to manipulate beliefs and behaviors in intentionally dishonest ways. The consequences are far-reaching and can range from mental health issues in individuals, to the societal corruption of democracy, to the deterioration of the planet through increased internet use. When we're truthful with web users and do not seek to mislead or manipulate them, we not only serve the best interests of the people using our products, but also create a more environmentally sustainable web.

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 12)

If the internet were a country, it would be the sixth most polluting country in the world, with annual emissions similar to those of Germany

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 5)

You don't make art after you become an artist. You become an artist by ceaselessly making art.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 183)

For the marketer, the freelancer, and the entrepreneur, the challenge is to reset your comfort level, to be okay with the undone, with the cycle of never ending. We were trained to finish our homework, our peas, and our chores. Today we're never finished, and that's okay. It's a dance, not a grind.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 165)

In the connection economy, the true measure of your work is whether you touched someone. The generosity and kamiwaza you bring to the process are part of the process, and the ability to detach from the outcome permits you to bring more of them. "What did you do and why did you do it?" These questions matter more than "Did the critics like it?"

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 144)

Writer's block isn't hard to cure. Just write. Write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better. Everyone should learn to write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly you don't need more criticism; you need more writing. Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something. If you know you have to write something every single day, even a paragraph, you will improve your writing. The resistance, of course, would rather have you write nothing, not speak up in public, keep it under wraps. If you're concerned only with avoiding error, then not writing is not a problem, because zero is perfect and without defects. Shipping nothing is safe. Fortunately, the second-best thing to zero is something better than bad. So if you know you have to write tomorrow, your brain will start working on something better than bad. And then you'll inevitably redefine bad and tomorrow will be better than that. And on and on. Write like you talk. Often.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 144)

Only when you make art that isn't for everyone do you have a chance to connect with someone. And when you connect with someone, amazingly, you increase the chances that you've made something that many will want.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 138)

The resistance is a symptom that you're on the right track. The resistance is not something to be avoided; it's something to seek out. That's the single most important sentence in this book. The artist seeks out the feeling of the resistance and then tries to maximize it. The cog, the day laborer, the compliant student -they seek to eliminate the feeling instead. That's the choice. Change your mind, right now, not later. If you determine that you will see better, make better, and most of all, dare to turn your tabula rasa into something frightening, that's when you will begin to live the life of the artist. And the artist's constant companion is the screaming lizard brain. If it goes away, you have to change your work until it returns.

— The Icarus Deception How High Will You Fly by Seth Godin (Page 119)