garoutte.com

For as much as people talk about living green and working in a paperless office, we still use lots of resources. It is amazing how much stuff we still print. All that printing uses lots of power, paper, and something we don’t always think of, ink or toner.

Well, now there is something you and I can do about that last item.

A design company in the Netherlands called SPRANQ has developed a new font based on the Open Source font Vera Sans, and has a series of small holes in the font body. When viewed at a large font size, it it quite noticeable – they say it looks like a ‘Swiss font’ but I think it appears more like an aircraft structural member that has the centers lightened with cutouts. But when viewed at a print size of 10pt, the human eye optically fills in the cutouts and the font appears solid.

When compared to a traditional solid font, it does appear slightly less dense.

According to the designers, it uses 20% less ink than a solid font of a similar style and size. That adds up to quite a savings of resources. Especially if thousands of people use it to print millions of documents.

Head over to http://www.ecofont.eu to view and download ecofont. It’s free to download and use!