How to Reduce Company Expenses in One Easy Step

by Diana L. Martin

If you run a business, you know the importance of keeping expenses down.  When it comes to your internal printing costs, standard operating procedure is to print internal documents in black or grayscale and save the pretty color prints for customer-facing documents or presentations.  Other ways to save money include using compatible or remanufactured cartridges instead of OEM cartridges, printing in draft mode instead of normal or high-quality modes and having one or two central printers that everyone shares instead of having individual printers on employees’ desks.

 So now that I’ve told you what you already know, I’d like to share something with you that you may not know – the font you choose for your documents can save you – or cost you – money.

 Yes, really!

 It’s a well-known fact in the print world, but not so much in the rest of the world. This would apply to both your run-of-the-mill everyday documents - and emails as well if you print them.

Now for the deets -

There are two basic types of fonts – serif and sans-serif.  Serif fonts are the ones with the “feet” on the letters, like Times New Roman.  Sans-serif fonts don’t have feet.  Here’s an example:

See the difference?  OK, good. 

The ink usage comes in the design of the letters.  You might think that the sans-serif font would use less ink because it doesn’t have those extra little feet on every letter, but that’s not necessarily true.  Serif fonts often have thinner lines than sans-serif styles and that means they use less ink and toner. Virtually all newspapers and books are printed in serif fonts like Times New Roman or Garamond.

Bold fonts and fonts with thicker lines will use more ink. In the examples above, you can see how much thicker the characters are in Arial.   Arial is a very ink-intensive font.  Century Gothic and Arial are both sans-serif fonts, but according to research conducted in the early 2000s by Printer.com, Century Gothic uses 30% less ink than Arial because it has thinner lines. In 2010, as a result of Printer.com’s findings, the University of Wisconsin asked faculty and staff to use Century Gothic whenever possible and the IT department changed the default font to Century Gothic in its email system and computer labs.  It was estimated that this action would save the university between $5000 and $10,000 annually.  Now I’m going to play devil’s advocate here. Century Gothic has wide, rounded letters – see the sample below - and while using it may save money on ink and toner, the wider letters could mean you use more paper to print your documents and the cost of the extra paper could negate some of the savings on the ink and toner. Also, many people find Century Gothic hard to read – especially in longer documents.  There are other fonts that would save on both paper and ink/toner.

Personally, I prefer narrower, more condensed fonts like Calibri.  Calibri is popular because it’s clean and easy to read – especially on screen. It was on Printer.com’s list of the Top 5 fonts for lowest ink usage.  It also has a light version, as do many fonts, so you can use the light version to save even more ink.  In case you’re wondering, their Top 5 fonts for lowest ink usage were Century Gothic, Times New Roman, Calibri, Verdana and Arial.  (It’s interesting that Arial is in the top 5 considering that they found that it uses 30% more ink than Century Gothic.)

See the difference? I’ll put them right next to each other:

Recently, Microsoft changed the default fonts on its Office products to Aptos and there’s something about that font that makes my eyes go buggy.  Additionally, the Microsoft default point size is 12-point, which makes me feel like the writer is shouting at me.  Maybe I’m just getting old…….  Anyway, I immediately changed all the defaults in all my programs back to Calibri 11 (but the rest of the world didn’t, so I have trouble reading most emails and attached documents).  I haven’t found any articles yet with mentions about the amount of ink that Aptos uses compared to the original Top 5, but it does come in multiple versions - including a serif version and a light version - so if you like it you could use either of those versions to cut costs.

Although we live in a mostly digital age, lots of documents and emails are still printed daily.  According to an article by Chris Mee at imageOne, the average office employee prints 10,000 pages annually. He goes on to say that 3% of the average company’s revenue is spent on printing each year and printing is the third largest expense outside of rent and payroll.  No wonder the University of Wisconsin made a change!  I wonder how much their actual savings were after the first year, but based on all this information it’s clear that just changing your company’s default font can result in significant cost savings.