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College To Save Money By Switching Email Font
The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has come up with an unusual way of saving money: changing their email font. The school expects to use 30% less ink by switching from Arial to Century Gothic. From the article: "Diane Blohowiak is the school's director of computing. She says the new font uses about 30 percent less ink than the previous one. That could add up to real savings, since the cost of printer ink works out to about $10,000 per gallon. Blohowiak says the decision is part of the school's five-year plan to go green. She tells Wisconsin Public Radio it's great that a change that's eco-friendly also saves money."
Only if people are printing emails...
E-mail should stay on e-lectronic media! Unless there is a genuine purpose to have a printed copy of an email, don't print it. Digital archives are much more cost effective than that overflowing file cabinet anyway.
Or, you could stop printing out all of your emails.
Oh, who am I kidding. We've still got professors at my school lecturing with transparencies they produced on typewriters. It's going to be years before the entirety of the faculty is willing to handle paperless communication.
--saint
Sounds like buying a couple of laser printers would save them more money. I wonder how much money they waste on email storage and bandwidth costs by sending HTML mail instead of plain text too.
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Seriously. If you're printing emails on the school's inkjet printers, your font is probably not the only change you need to make.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Another approach would be to ban ridiculous gigantic .sig files, complete with name, email address, snail-mail, address, three phone numbers, URL, twitter link, facebook link, linkedin link, blog link, some kind of logo and a giant block of text mandated by legal. Oh yeah, and coded in HTML so it matches corporate colours. Ugh.
Sometimes I get emails where the sig is longer than the body of the freakin' email.
You could also just tell people to stop printing out their emails.
Excellent!!! Can you also tell them to stop shouting, killing, being stupid, go to war?
Depends on your idea of 'better'. As a decorative header/ display/ advertising font, some could say it looks much nicer. However, as just a standard reading font it is very wide and hard to read. They will probably end up using more paper and reducing readability.
meep
...email has fonts?
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Because they would actually need to install this font/software. They can easily switch fonts and assume that everybody has Century Gothic as it's already widely installed. The additional IT overhead probably don't justify the impact on savings.
4 ) In order to optimise the legibility of the printed text, we have set an Ecoprint range. Only text up to a particular point size – generally 11 points - is printed in the Ecofont font. Larger text is printed in the normal font.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
The biggest reason, however, is that I don't want to have to sit in an office to read and grade dozens of papers. I want to be able to do it on a plane, a train, a bus, on the beach, etc.
They have these new devices called laptops. Check them out. There those funny looking things your students bring to class.
I'd think it would also be easier to carry around a small netbook than a huge stack of papers on a bus or plane.
Ride the skies
(Wait a bit) and try an eBook that supports annotations using a touch screen & stylus - e.g. an iRex one. You can bring *every* paper anyone has made with you instead, and be able to read comfortably as well. What I cannot understand is how you can accept only paper copies. Are there contributions so uninteresting that you don't want to store or index them somewhere?