This font is a completely new innovation. The entire concept for Ryman Eco is about finding the perfect balance between saving ink, legibility and aesthetics.

Previous efforts to create an environmentally friendly font have suffered key flaws, which we have sought to remove:

• Uses an average 33% less ink than a suite of standard fonts including Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia and Verdana and 27% less ink than the leading sustainable font

• Beautiful and legible when printed: at standard point size (10-14 point) Ryman Eco looks like a normal font thanks to the inherent bleeding of ink and toner. At larger sizes, the white space in between the dozens of tiny thin lines and curves, which make up each letter become more visible, but it remains highly elegant and readable. Its characters are more fragile on screen, but it runs out beautifully. This is a necessary compromise.

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. We pushed the character forms to make them even more interesting and distinctly Ryman without using more ink: efficiency combined with elegancy.

At time of writing:

• The video was viewed 43,070 times, in 138 of the world’s 196 countries (70.4%).

• Of the 43,070 people who watched the video, 23,806 have downloaded it (55.27%).

The font attracted lots of attention on Twitter, including re-Tweets by WWF UK during Earth Hour, and has had coverage from the BBC, Creative Review, Evening Standard, and Fast Company – even making national front page news in Argentina’s ‘El Nacional’ newspaper.

As people start to use Ryman Eco, the font launch has helped Ryman succeed in its CSR mission to get the world to print more sustainably.

The long term goal is to produce further character sets, so that the font is even more accessible and usable around the world – such as an italic version, Cyrillic letters and other global languages. There is no plan to sell the font – we want to ensure it always remains free to download for anyone to use.

We hope Ryman Eco encourages debate on font use and printing, and spurs development of similar fonts which are more ink efficient.