Less Ink, More Money

 

14-year-old Suvir Mirchandani came up with a brilliant idea on how the government and generally anyone who prints save tons of money. As many students know, when turning in a paper – most teachers generally as for Times New Roman font. Right? Right! Why, who knows  – because they can read it, it looks professional, who knows. But in reality, who cares what font you type in as long as it is done and people can read it but that is just my personal opinion.

Anyway, according to CNN Suvir’s idea started with the following, “interested in applying computer science to promote environmental sustainability, Suvir decided he was going to figure out if there was a better way to minimize the constant flurry of paper and ink.”

His study consisted of testing four different popular fonts; Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Comic Sans. Through his findings –  Suvir figured out that by using Garamond with its thinner strokes, his school district could reduce its ink consumption by 24%, and in turn save as much as $21,000 annually. Pretty amazing right!?

Through our class, we have been focusing on the impact technologies have on writing. Typing is done through a technology – the computer. As a college student, I type at least one paper a night and end up printing it in Times New Roman per professor request, so I could be saying myself millions (well maybe not millions but close)! This idea of changing from handwritten to typed and now from typed to printed but in a better way.

Bolter expresses the concept of writing in the late age of print and how the remediation of print is occurring. Typing and printing documents is something that is not foreign to us, we do it all the time. But when we do it, do we really think about what we are printing and if it is necessary? Speaking from personal experience, I work in an office where paper is endless and comes from every direction – we are trying to get away from that and move to online, emailing, and so on. The amount of pointless information we print is a joke and if we are going to do – lets save some money!

I think this concept of changing something so simple as a font type to save the government millions is brilliant, and it only took a 14 year old to figure it out! If the government could save that much money by changing something so small – what else can they save money on and put to better use?

Next time I get asked to type a paper, I will happily type it and print it not in Time New Roman but in Garamond. Just saved myself a few bucks! Think about it the next time you need to print something – is it worth printing, do you need it, if so save some trees and save yourself some ink and doing all that saves YOU money. Woohoo!

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