Century Gothic Saves More Ink Than Ecofont

By
Lloyd Alter
Lloyd Alter
Design Editor
  • University of Toronto
Lloyd Alter is Design Editor for Treehugger and teaches Sustainable Design at Ryerson University in Toronto.
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Lloyd Alter
Updated October 11, 2018
century gothic font saves ink image
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Two years ago Jaymi wrote about ecofont, the typeface that Takes The Swiss Cheese Approach to Saving Printer Ink.

It worked, but it didn't exactly set the type design world's hearts aflutter, being a little rounder and nicer looking than arial (anything is nicer than arial) but not exciting to look at and a bit grey at larger font sizes due to the little holes. It also a very small subset of the population that thinks enough about type design that they would actually pay for it.
According to NPR, Professor Mat Dornbush suggested that University of Wisconsin-Green Bay switch to Ecofont, but the computer department had a better idea: switch to Century Gothic, a font with a thinner print line. They suggest that it can use 30% less than Arial.

century gothic font saves ink image futura


Century Gothic is a 1991 computer update of Twentieth Century, which was a version of the famous Futura, designed in 1927 and beloved of the Bauhaus and modernists everywhere.

Proving, once again, that good design saves money and the environment.