Save Trees, Reduce Paper Waste

Most designers I know care about the impact the design industry has on the enviroment. I think there's a lot of guilt about all the paper our industry creates -- ads, magazines, brochures, business cards, greeting cards, posters, etc so the idea that anything we can do to reduce paper waste is an idea to consider.

Green Print offers an application for streamlining printed files, especially from the web, to remove unwanted pages -- like only one line of text or the tail end of an ad. The application is a very streamlined print preview option. The goal is to reduce paper waste and reduce costs associated with ink and toner use (save the world and save money too!). The home license for GreenPrint costs $35 and is available for Windows operating systems only.

GreenPrint also offers a font called Evergreen that remains legible while fitting more words onto each page. Compared to default fonts like Arial, Helvetica and Times, EverGreen claims to reduce paper use by as much as 20%. Overall, I think the font is a pretty solution and for a mere $10 for Mac or PC, its a very good deal. My only dislike is that they added an odd line to the uppercase T to simulate a tree. A little heavy-handed and not particularly aesthetically pleasing.

I think I'll just reduce my font sizes, margins and line spacing when printing text documents and using a condensed font for the time being.