Ecofont: Free holey font that saves ink

Printing doesn’t just use paper—it also uses ink. So Dutch design house SPRANQ have created a new font, “SPRANQ Eco Sans Regular”, that peppers its arms and ascenders with holes to use less ink when printed. Thus, its common name: “ecofont”.

It’s rather pointless for the web, considering all colors of pixels use the same amount of power in LCD displays, but for home and office printing, the savings could add up—if you bother changing each document to the free TrueType font before printing.

Still, if you’d like to know what Ecofont looks like on the web, you’re soaking in it—if you’re using a browser that supports @font-face CSS embeddable fonts such as Safari 3.1, FireFox 3.5, Opera 10 (or later). (Hence the giant font on this post. Take a squint at the big capital letters in “SPRANQ” and you might be able to see the little perforated lines.)

The designers claim they were inspired by holey Dutch cheeses, such as Maaslander.

Image: Rayan Jeroen