Ryman and Grey London create sustainable font with Monotype and Hogarth

The font was designed by Monotype and Hogarth, and if used by everyone, would save nearly 15 million barrels of oil a year.

Dan Rhatigan, type director at Monotype, said: “The entire concept for Ryman Eco is about the final print experience and finding the perfect balance between saving ink, legibility and aesthetics. To encourage enough interest so that people would want to use the font, we needed to make something that would be visually interesting at a close look or a large size, but useful and effective for everyday printed text.

“We looked at how our eyes and brains compensate by filling in ‘missing’ areas and how much of a character we can remove before we lose the sense of its form. Then we pushed the character forms to make them even more interesting and distinctly Ryman without using more ink.”

At standard point size of between 10 and 14 point, Ryman Eco looks like a normal font thanks to the inherent bleeding of ink and toner, the companies say.

Grey London’s executive creative director Nils Leonard said: “We realised if we could make the words and numbers we print more efficient, then we’d make cartridges more efficient too, reducing their environmental impact. I tweeted Ryman owner Theo Paphitis with our idea for a good thing a stationer could do for the planet and he understood its wide-ranging implications straight away. A month later, we’ve developed an environmentally friendly font the world will really want to print with. Sustainable. Beautiful. Free.”