By now most of us have realized that different fonts come in different sizes and thickness. For example Arial Bold is naturally a lot thicker compared to Arial, and what this means is that the amount of ink required to print an entire page written in Arial Bold would naturally be more, compared to using fonts that are “thinner”.
This is the realization that a 14-year, Suvir Mirchandani, stumbled upon when tasked with trying to save money for his school district. He compared a group of fonts, printed them, weighed them, and came to the startling discovery that if the Garamond font were to be used, it could potentially save his school district $21,000 a year in ink.
As his findings yielded a lot of potential, his teacher encouraged him to publish his findings and thanks to the Journal for Emerging Investigators (JEI), Suvir attempted to apply his findings to the federal government. By using the General Services Administration’s estimation of $467 million a year in ink, Suvir found that if the government were to switch to Garamond, they could save $136 million a year, with an additional $234 million if state governments were on board as well.
According to Suvir, he admits that his project could be difficult to implement on a larger scale. We can only imagine that there are other factors that need to be taken into consideration, but according to him, “I definitely would love to see some actual changes and I’d be happy to go as far as possible to make that change possible.”
So the next time you want to cut down on your ink consumption, perhaps switching to the Garamond font could be one way to go about doing it.
Filed in . Read more about Research.