Switch Fonts, Save Ink (and dollars)

In the news over the last few days, reports about a kid whose science fair project was to compute how much the government could save by changing fonts. Long story short: some type faces require considerably less ink than others; the federal government prints lots and lots of documents; it buys a lot of ink and toner for its printers; it could buy less if it changed fonts.

Garamond, a typeface that requires about 25% less than other common fonts (such as Times New Roman), was  created by Claude Garamont in the early 16th century. How much could a school like our save? Not millions, a fair guess might be 10-20% of toner/ink costs.

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Author: Dan Ryan

I'm currently an Academic Program Director at MinervaProject.com. I've been a professor at University of Toronto, University of Southern California, and Mills College teaching things like human centered design, computational thinking, modeling for policy sciences, and social theory. I'm driven by the desire to figure out how to teach twice as many twice as well twice as easily.

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