Fricofont

Inspiration

We were inspired by a study that found the US Government could save up to 30% on ink costs just by switching to a different font. This led us to discovering Ecofont, which is a font designed specifically to save ink. However, Ecofont is only being licensed out to companies. It's also limited by attempting to look exactly like the original font. We figured we could save even more ink by creating a free font that, while noticeable, is no less readable.

What it does

Fricofont is based on Courier, one of the most efficient fonts. It turns the letters into outlines, but keeps the serifs. This way it uses less ink but is still readable.

How we built it

We tried our process on a bunch of different fonts. Ironically Vera, the font Ecofont is based on, is one of the most expensive and least readable! We settled on Courier because of its easy readability and low ink use.

Challenges we ran into

Fricofont, we soon discovered, looks horrible on most word processing software. It looks fine when printed, but because of the small details in Fricofont and the antialiasing in most versions of Word, it looks horrible on screen. Because of that, we had to make a software that would automatically convert a given document to Fricofont for printing.