Changing the Design of Your Documents Could Save the Environment

The environment; we know we need to save it but we don’t necessarily know how. Over the past couple of weeks, we at Cartridge World have posted a few ideas on how to limit the environmental impact of your printer, helping you make a small but vital contribution to ongoing efforts to reduce the impact of day-to-day life on our planet.

Most of the ideas we have presented have related to printing supplies or your printer settings but in this post we’re going to branch out a little bit and discuss a novel way to limit your carbon footprint; design and layout.

Different designs and layouts demand different levels of ink consumption; a standard black and white text document will use far less ink than a full colour, image heavy flyer for an event, for example.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should only print black and white text documents. With just a few clever design tricks, you can make any design for print more environmentally friendly without compromising on style! Here are a few of the best eco-friendly design tips we’ve found.

Change Your Font

Most of us choose the font we use in word documents based on our personal aesthetic preferences and the intended audience for a document. However, your choice of font will also dictate how much ink is used when printing out that document.

Top of the eco-friendly font chart is Century Gothic, followed by Ecofont (a font designed specifically to save ink), old favourite Times New Roman and new Microsoft Word default Calibri. As a general rule, the lighter and thinner a font is, the less ink it’ll use.

Size Matters

The size of your font matters as much as the style of it when it comes to saving on print supplies. The smaller a font is, the more words you can fit onto a single page, thus reducing the amount of paper you use. Small fonts also take less ink to print out, meaning you get through less ink cartridges!

Narrow Margins

The standard text document is laid out in a manner that makes it easy-to-read and easy on the eye. However, the standard layout isn’t necessarily the most environmentally friendly. Margins, in particular, gobble up a lot of page space that could be used for text instead so it’s good practice to narrow the size of your margins in the page layout options before you hit print!

Quality Control

Images and photos are a major ink consumer, especially when they are printed at high resolutions. Although high resolution imagery is essential for promotional material such as brochures and formal documents, you should be able to get away with lower resolution imagery for most print jobs.

You can alter the quality of an image by making it smaller (thus using less pixels) or saving the picture as a different file type - for example, JPEG images tend to be of a lower, but still acceptable, quality than TIFF images.

Less Is More

If you’re the kind of person who likes to cram their flyer designs to the margin with images and text, or the kind of writer who can waffle on for pages before actually making their point then printing can actually help you with the editing process!

The longer or more detailed a document is, the more ink and paper it’s going to use. With that in mind, try and edit your document so it gets your point across in as little words or images as possible. You should find you end up with a more succinct and effective document, as well as saving yourself a few quid on ink and toner cartridges!

See, limiting the environmental impact of your printing isn’t that hard at all! Check out the blog for more environmentally friendly printing tips and don’t forget to get down to your local Cartridge World store for big savings on ink cartridge refills and remanufactured toner cartridges!