Save Money on Office Printing Costs

Mark Hale ‐ April 29, 2014

Can the Correct Font Save You Money on Your Office Printing Costs?

With the advent of desktop publishing, many businesses in an effort to save money are buying laser and ink jet printers for their offices with the idea they can save money on printing costs. Businesses’ owners and managers are printing flyers and color brochures in house to save money on printing costs. Seems the ink jet printer manufactures figured out that they could sell you a cheap color printer and make a fortune on selling you the ink and laser cartridges. If you are printing consistent quantities of sales flyers, brochures or newsletters in house you are probably ordering a lot of toner and ink cartridges. It is $50 here, $100 there and pretty soon you are losing all the money you were saving by doing it yourself. If this sounds like your office, there are some things you can do that will save your company thousands of dollars on your office printing costs

Most of us probably choose a font for legibility, mood, or beauty. Recent research by Printer.com, a Dutch company, brings to light new information for choosing fonts. Their study shows that your choice of fonts can dramatically impact your ink or toner costs for the year. The University of Wisconsin at Green Bay was used for the study, and their estimated savings is between five and ten thousand dollars a year when they choose certain fonts.

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The crux of ink usage is obviously in the design of the letters. Narrow or light versions of a font will use less ink than their bold or black counterparts. Serif fonts tend to use less ink, as the lines are thinner. Century Gothic, for example, uses on average 30% less ink than Arial. The top five fonts according to Printer.com for low ink usage are Century Gothic, Times New Roman, Calibri, Verdani and Arial. Of course, it makes sense to check your print quality and use draft quality, InkSaver and APFill whenever possible.

Another interesting endeavor in the font world is Ecofont. Essentially, they offer a “holey” version of fonts. Ecofont Vera Sans, based on an open-source font, is free to use and can be downloaded from the Web. Ecofont software will soon be available. With it, one can apply the holey concept to the font of their choice.

One final piece of interesting research comes from Matt Robinson. In “Measuring Type,” he has artistically shown how a number of typefaces rate in terms of ink usage. It is worth the Google search to see his interesting pictorial done with ballpoint pens. He recommends the Garamond typeface for reducing printing costs.

If you are printing a lot of full flyers, brochures and point of sale materials consistently, you should call Wilson Printing for help. Our costs are usually very affordable. We have professional graphic designers who can make your materials more appealing and effective. Call us and let us show you how we can help you.