A Dutch company has come up with a clever way of saving some of the huge amount of ink that gets used in office inkjets and laser printers these days. Rather than developing complex systems to save in Holland-based Sprang has gone back to first principals and designed a ‘greener’ typeface, Ecofont, which features circles of blank space embedded in each letter they say.

“After Dutch holey cheese, there now is a Dutch font with holes as well.”

Sprang co-founder Gerjon Zomer claims the use of circular holes, means the font uses 20% less ink than traditional fonts, while maintaining readability.

Zomer says that the

“power of Ecofont is its simplicity”. He added: “There are a lot of complicated solutions out there to save ink, but they don’t usually appeal to people.”

Spang started by looking at popular Dutch font Verdana. The team deleted thin vertical strips within each letter, but found the text to be unreadable on most computer screens. It then tried cutting squares and stars out of fonts, but soon realised circles were most effective.

The advantage of changing the font is that it works on all printers and doesn’t require new printer/hardware just changing a fonts – computers only use this font when printing sticking with the tried and tested truetype for display on monitors.

You can download Ecofont  from www.ecofont.eu as its the sort of elegant solution Apple is known for I bet Apple are kicking them selves for not thinking of this.