My cover letter just got shot by a Tommy Gun! SPRANQ, a creative communications agency, remixed the classic Verdana font type with embedded, slightly rounded circles to reduce the amount of coverage and ink in your average business letter. The green hype for this type may be little more than a marketing tactic for this media company. First, visual aesthetics of the shot up font could be a detractor for many because of readability. For best results, SPRANQ recommends limiting the font size to 9 or 10 points. This keeps the holes to ink at the optimal blend – not too small or too large, but just right. Second, the cost savings from using up to 20% less ink may be hard to acheive since the font has to be manually installed and selected in the application.
If I wanted Swiss type, I would use Helvetica. – Frank Romano, National Geographic, August 2009
Frank Romano points out the gimmicky nature of the font and also to a potential problem with printing the Ecofont on inexpensive inkjet printers. If you want to give the font a try, it is available for a free download.
