The ecofont (second from top) compared to Bitstream Vera (top)

I have come across this story from multiple sources now.  Here is the link to the story on NPR, and the link to download the ecofont http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html. The ecofont is made by a company called Spranq.

From the ecofont website:

…how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink. Free to download, free to use.

Of course, I immediately downloaded it to try it out.  I love techie stuff like this.  I liked the idea of reducing consumption from another angle.  The font is an innovative way of spurring more conversation about alternative methods of reducing consumption of a potentially hazardous product, toner and ink. Spranq states that they base the 20% reduction on the Bitstream Vera font.

I wanted to see how our BJG fonts used in letters and manuals (Swiss 721 Light Extended BT for the majority of text and Vera Humana for titles and such) stacked up against the new ecofont.

So, I set out on a little experiment.  I took a letter I had written and changed the fonts to the new ecofont.  I printed them both out.  There was a noticeable difference between our standard font and the ecofont.  The ecofont website implies that they would use the font for daily use and not for final draft materials and I agree.  The ecofont comes out looking a little on the grey side.

My test suite of fonts

Next, I got a little more scientific.  I opened up Google SketchUp to get the exact (or close enough) area of a couple of different fonts.  I used the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” (a panagram for you trivia buffs) as my baseline.  I scaled all the sentences so that the letter “T” in the each sentence was 1′-0″ high.  I figured this was a good estimation of getting the fonts the same size.

I then exploded the fonts used SketchUp to calculate the areas of the letters in the sentence for each font.   The table below shows the results.

Setting up the fonts

True to their claim, the ecofont uses exactly 20% less area than the Bitstream Vera font.  However, the Vera Humana font uses 10% less than the ecofont and the Swiss font uses 3% more.  Before I started out, I assumed that the Swiss font would have used less, but numbers don’t lie!.  Interestingly enough, plain old Times New Roman uses the same area as the ecofont.  And of course, the big, bold, Arial Black uses 128% more area than the ecofont.

Again, I really like the idea of the font.  It is innovative, different and spurs conversation about alternative ways to reduce our consumption of hazardous products.  I am amazed that it received coverage on NPR.  Green is on the forefront of everyone’s mind these days.