Could changing your printer font save you money?

If you’ve ever wondered how much printer ink is used according to the typeface you choose for your office documents, then young designer Matthew Robinson could have the answer. His Measuring Type experiment may even help you to save money on cartridge costs.

Matthew compared eight popular type faces to see how they ranked in ink usage. He used ball point pens for an ink economy test, handwriting sample text in the same size in eight different fonts, including Courier and Times New Roman. The ink remaining in the ball point pen revealed the ink-efficiency of each font.

I’m not saying businesses should send out a diktat on which font should be used, but you will see that Garamond is far less profligate than Comic Sans. And if this has sparked your interest, then you may want to know about a new typeface that’s been invented to save toner and ink, and reduce office waste. It’s called Ecofont and it claims to enable sustainable printing.

From what I understand Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans type, but with tiny holes punched out of it, so that you use less ink. When you print at a small size, the holes almost disappear. I haven’t used it, but I think it’s an interesting idea. Check it out.