The Greenpeace Green my Apple campaign
When Greenpeace launched their Green my Apple campaign site a year ago I had a hard time keeping my mouth shut, but I think I managed reasonably well. Now that Veerle Pieters has posted an article about the Greenpeace Green my Apple project I can let everyone know that I did part of the front-end coding for the site.
I’ve been a huge Apple fan for a long time, so I was a bit disturbed when I found out that they weren’t doing their very best to protect the environment. If I could do anything to improve that situation, I thought I should. Being an Apple fan does not mean I will ignore problems.
Just like Veerle I had my doubts about the whole thing at first, mostly because the project involved copying (or ripping off, if you prefer that term) Apple’s design. It was for a good cause though, so morally I didn’t feel that it was a problem. It was Apple sending their lawyers after us that had me worried. But after Veerle told me that Greenpeace would take full responsibility if anything like that should happen I jumped on board. Besides, I only did the coding, not the graphic design.
Coding-wise this project isn’t very complicated, though there were a couple of accessibility challenges. I managed to find what I think are reasonable solutions to most of these challenges, but if I redid the project today I would probably do some things a little differently.
If you look at the code and find strange things like unescaped ampersands or images with no alt attributes, rest assured that those were not in the markup I handed over ;-). For more details on part of the coding as well as the story behind the graphic design, read Veerle’s post Greenpeace Green my Apple project, which I co-authored with her.
The campaign is over now but the site, which won a Webby award in the activism category, is still online.
Finally, like Veerle I’m asking you to please not turn the comments area into a political discussion about Apple vs. Greenpeace vs. the environment.
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About the author
Roger Johansson is a Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability. More about me and this site.
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Comments
Nuke the whales!
I think you would have been safe, considering you weren't passing yourselves off as Apple and didn't use any of their code. Print and TV often imitate styles to make a point. Would have been an interesting test case, anyway.
I liked the campaign a lot, and had no idea you were involved. Congratulations.
I remember seeing this site some time ago, never looked at the code however.
It is kinda cool that you had the whole Mac glassy tabs done in a CSS layout where as the actual apple.com site still had their nav wrapped in tables. (Thankfully this is now gone)
Hi there,
Just a quick message to say "well done"! great design, css looks good and seems overall nice and compliant ... hats off!
Peter.
Well done, great work and a worthy cause.
Hi Roger,
Thanks for your help on the site, any code strangeness I probably have to own up to when updating the site.
We preferred to think of it as 'reusing and recycling' Apple's style for the good cause of a greener Apple :)
Tom
Greenpeace
I wish I had known about this site sooner. Seems like it got the job done without me though. Congrats on being involved with such a successful project
Apple had innovation ideas with all of their inventions.And this with very good designs as well.Congratulations.
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