subject: Font Choice, Graphic Design and Your Printing Bottom Line [print this page] Font Choice, Graphic Design and Your Printing Bottom Line
Your Font Choice in Your Graphic Design Effects Your Printing Bottom Line and More.
The minimum font size one should use in color brochures, business cards and printed door hangers is a great debate. After all, what is the use of printing if the font is too small to read. Now of course many industries, such as electronics, pharmaceutical and legal, need that ominous small type print. But is this done to hide from the truth, slip in shady terms and conditions or to save money at the printer?
Which leads me to an interesting fact from the blog The Digital Nirvana:
Costs: Does Font Choice Make a Difference?
Printer.com decided to take the analysis a bit further and test 9 different fonts for their respective ink and toner usage. The most efficient font cost 30% less than Arial in supplies costs and the least efficient cost 10% more than Arial. That's a potential 40% swing in cost based on font selection.
Font choice is thus a major area to save and literally profit off of, depending on the size and type of print-job you will be making. Many creatives would be quick to push this off to only really valid for bank statements, invoices and other financial documents that are printed. Yes, of course it is clear that these type of print-documents should do as such, for that is great for the environment.
Naturally, these fonts studied are more for general business use, but can we do out little part for the environment too? Let's face it, most of our corporate customers (Or maybe we work within a corporate design department) could care less if you use Century Gothic, the most affordable font in print listed above or Futura in general graphic design layouts.
The amount of ink you will use on your prints can also lead to a higher, or lower cost... By using ink-economical fonts, you can negotiate a better price at the print-shop as well.
So where do we start? Fonts and cost saving have long been something Markzware's FlightCheck Professional has addressed well. It not only can check ink coverage, but more specifically on type; their status (Missing or not embedded), point size used, the font's manufacturer or font-foundry, wether it has been stylized and much more. Stylization of course is key in saving money on printing through your font usage, as a bold-stylized-font will cost more than a plain font to output on paper.
Another handy feature in the new FlightCheck Professional v6.75 is the "Corporate Font List" option you can turn on in the Ground Controls, which is where you set-up your preflight profiles. This editable list allows corporate design departments or advertising studios to flag up as error the use of certain type-face's. Very handy for licensing issues, PDF embedding problems and yes, for Font Choice, Graphic Design and Your Printing Bottom Line!
Yes, our choices of the elements used within an Adobe InDesign Creative Suite 5 layout matter in a much bigger way then we ever could perhaps imagine. A smart design can look great, help the environment and save you money all at the same time!
