Eco friendly font

In the August issue of the National Geographic magazine there's an article about a so-called Ecofont based on the Bitstream face called Vera (quite nice actually!). To quote from the article, the font has been designed to use less ink than other faces thereby saving money and resources as well as money. The Dutch marketing firm Spranq says that a company with 5,000 workers could save up to £75,000 a year from its printing costs. That's around £15 per person per annum - around 28p per person per week. More realistically perhaps, a 5-person office could save around £75 per annum!

The type has small holes that reduce the overall printing area of the type by 20% at 10pt without reducing the readability and this is the optimum size for its use. Anything much larger than this and you can see the holes and much smaller you are not making much of an ink saving. As somebody else says in the article, "it makes you think hard about ink, not just paper and printers."

We think it's great that somebody is thinking about things like this and, after all, if we only use it for home and internal office emails, we'll be contributing just that little bit. You can download the font at ecofont.eu.

What do you feel? Is the trade-off between aesthetics and reducing your damage to the planet and its resources worth it?