This idea was pursued by Suvir Mirchandani as a topic for his science fair project. He enlarged and printed of examples of different fonts on card stock and weighed them to find the difference in ink they required. His findings were that the Garamond font used about 24% less ink and if his school district switched to it, they could save up to $21,000 dollars annually!
He was encouraged by his teacher to get his findings published in the Journal for Emerging Investigators (JEI), which is a publication founded by Harvard grad students. They were so impressed that they challenged Savir to see if he could calculate the potential savings on a larger scale.
He repeated his experiment using sample documents from state and federal websites. The federal government has a 1.8 million dollar annual printing budget, and of that sum, $467 million is spent on ink. He calculated that switching all printing to the Garamond font could result in a 30% savings or about $136 million a year. An additional $234 million could be saved if state governments got on board the project as well.
I find it amazing that this much money could be saved simply by switching the font used for printing. Even more amazing that this experiments was thought up and executed by a 14 year old for a science fair project!
It makes me wonder how much of a savings we could all make by switching fonts at work and at home. It will definitely make me think twice the next time I format something in bold text...
Here is a link to the CNN article I originally found this story:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/27/living/student-money-saving-typeface-garamond-schools/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
14-year-old Suvir Mirchandani began studying fonts as part of a science fair project.
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