Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Change Your Font, Save the World


I read an odd little front of the book article in a recent National Geographic magazine about the "ecofont"—a software tool that digitally "punches" holes in your existing fonts, so that when you print a document it uses 20% less ink (and, as some skeptics pointed out, gets at least that much less legible).

Brilliant idea or utter greenwash? You decide.

3 comments:

Craig Saunders said...

Yeah, there's also a push to print all the way across margins. Sure, it uses less paper (and may be okay for personal notes), but readability goes way down.

richard said...

I've been using this font for a little while -- but I print off so few things that it doesn't have all that much impact. Like Craig suggests, I've been shrinking my margins as well, but there does come a point of diminishing returns there.

David L. said...

Interesting to get the perspective of someone who has actually used this font.

My eco-strategy seems to be: let your personal printer get so old and unreliable that you end up just saving PDFs of stuff you originally intended to print out and then forgetting which folder you saved the PDF to or even what you saved, so it probably wasn't all that important anyway. I suppose that's the "eccentric professor" method.

Maybe next I'll stand in the office and blow my whistle whenever I catch colleagues printing off recipes on the department printer...