About Me

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Len focuses on helping small and new businesses succeed through developing appropriate marketing and sales strategies. Len enjoys mentoring, relishes in getting both arms and feet wet in addressing technology, marketing and sales issues. He understands the drivers impacting business results for today and tomorrow including time-to-market, time-to-revenue, marketing, sales channels and social media.

Monday, March 29, 2010

An Eco Font Tip - This is not an April Fool's Prank - Century Gothic beats Arial Anytime

The default font for most computer users is Arial. As reported in The Register, Diane Blohowiak, Director of Computing and Information Technology, at University of Wisconsin in Green Bay, in an effort to go green has switched the college's default email font from Arial to Century Gothic.

Why?

Apart from my own preference for Century Gothic over Arial, it appears that it is not just font appearance that makes this an appealing choice. Blohowiak's research showed that when Century Gothic is sent to printers it uses 30% less ink than Arial. With printer ink costing $10,000 per gallon, Blohowiak sees substantial savings in the office supply budget in making this change.

I did a little more research and found another "eco" font solution at of all things Ecofont. Ecofont shoots holes into your print characters to reduce the amount of ink you use by as much as 25% according to their web site.



I'm a great believer in using QuickPrint features on my home ink jet printer because I know it saves ink which saves me money. But it certainly doesn't save paper and the trees that are needed to produce the paper.

Of course we could all dispense with printing paper entirely, the dream of the electronic office finally realized. But it seems that computers have not eliminated hard copy as of yet.

So if I switch to Century Gothic, use Ecofont and select QuickPrint does that mean I'll be using no ink at all? Stay tuned to this channel for more "eco" friendly business advice and have fun with your fonts.
 
"Go green."

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Who knew that changing fonts would make that much difference? Thanks for the tip Len.