For years, my trusty Epson Stylus 2200 was my only home printer. It always pained me to use my costsly photo and matte black inks for wholly necessary, but totally pedestrian plain-paper printing tasks such as directions to assignments and shopping lists. Now, there's a "holey" font from Europe that will cut ink laydown by fully one fifth for basic print needs.
Spranq's new Ecofont is a Sans Serif font filled with holes to reduce ink laydown by 20%.
The August 2009 issue of National Geographic tipped me to Spranq's new Ecofont, a free-for-personal use Sans Serif font filled with holes a la Ementhaler cheese which will reduce ink laydown by 20% compared to similar non-pierced Sans fonts. What this means for photographers who have only one home multitasker printer is less ink spraydown for plain-paper font-based day-to-day things like directions to assignments, grocery lists and email printouts, which leaves more ink for the high resolution photorealistic prints.
I wish Spranq had come out with this when my trusty Epson 2200 was my daily workhorse! I can't tell you how much archival ink I sprayed for photo assignments and directions through the years. We've just installed Ecofont on all our home computers routed to our Canon MX310 all-in-one, and we'll be printing with Ecofont whenever possible.
At small font sizes, the holes are virtually invisible. At larger sizes, the holes are noticable, but the text is utterly legible. We reckon many eco-conscious brands and photographers will make a point of using the Ecofont at larger sizes to promote and publicly acknowledge their green agendas, as more and more people become aware of this cool new typographic treatment.
And note that the font is officially called Spranq Eco Sans, so once you install it to your system, it will be under "S" and not "E" in your font library.
Got any other tips for being a more eco-conscious photographer? Let us know!
