The Ryman Eco font
Ryman has designed a “sustainable” font to cut the costs and impacts of printing.
Business Green reported on the stationery company’s new eco font, which is said to use 27 percent less ink and toner in printing than standard fonts and in turn 6.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year, with the company calling its “sustainable font” the Ryman Eco font.
The font is said to look “like a normal font at point sizes between 10 and 14 because of the way our eyes and brains fill in ‘missing areas”, with larger sizes still remaining “elegant and readable”. The font was developed with creative agency Grey London, who teamed with the stationer after Ryman’s Chairman Theo Paphitis received a tweet from the agency, and is made up of “dozens of tiny thin lines and curves separated by white space”.
The font has already been implemented across the company’s 96 country network of shops, and will be available for free “in the hope [that] more companies and households will adopt it”. The company estimates that if everyone used Ryman Eco, it would save over 490 million cartridges and 15 million barrels of oil, which gave it the 6.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions saving.
Paphitis commented: “At Ryman we love print – but we don’t like what it does to the planet. Recycling alone isn’t doing enough. So I am asking individuals and businesses, especially those who use print a lot in their day-to-day operations, to download Ryman Eco for free and make it their default print font. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do but could make a world of difference.”
The Recycler recently reported on 14 year-old American student Suvir Mirchandani’s research, which calculated that the US government could save hundreds of millions of dollars per year if it switched font from Times New Roman to Garamond.