Sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones

Feb 10, 2009

My sister sent this one through to me, and I think it's just great: a font with holes in, allowing you to save up to 20% on ink and therefore reduce your impact on the environment.

Here's what the font looks like inside AutoCAD, to give you an idea:

I don't think the eco-innovators have very much to teach the CAD world, however: we've been using dashed linetypes for years! 🙂

I'd be very interested to hear how the readers of this blog have made changes to their (or their customers') work processes in the interests of either economy or ecology. The obvious one would be to keep the data in digital form - avoiding paper - although for many reasons this isn't always an option. Please post a comment!

That's it for today. I'm now on my way home after being on the road for 2 weeks (a looong trip). Once I'm back in the office I'm planning a series to cover some of the API changes in the recently-announced AutoCAD 2010. Watch this space...

2 responses to “Sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones”

Fernando Malard

February 10, 2009 at 3:20 pm

Kean,

One thing I think needs improvement is the ability to review drawings at the computer screen to avoid unecessary printings. The cost of both paper and ink can became huge for companies that work with several projects with several reviews.

The introduction of DWF tools has opened an opportunity to all companies to start to use the computer for review tasks but I'm still observing today a lot of people which is unsecure to do that at the screen. They keep doing their printings to trace color pens over the lines, to add sketches to the drawings, etc.

This reminds me the age of the ink pens (today replaced by the ploters) when users need to draw the sketch using pencil and then pass the ink pen over the lines for the final drawing.

The idea of a font with holes is great but I think this is not enough. My company has developed a software to bill plotting into companies to allow CAD managers to calculate the total amount of money spent with plotting. The numbers are sometimes scary. This tool by itself end up avoiding the waste of money only by monitoring users and due that making they think twice before send a plot job to the printer. They stop and think..."do I really need to print this?".

The end result is a huge money saving for plotting pluse the rational use of the plotter.

AutoCAD itself has contributed a lot to the environment once it avoid the use of paper and ink but this does not work if people keep printing things to just see how beautiful they look at the paper!

Let's hear from the other Bloggers... 🙂

Regards,
Fernando.

Reply
Quiz

February 11, 2009 at 7:53 pm

What the russian designers think about this:
translate.google.com...
press "with comments" link for more info 🙂

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Through the Interface

Sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones

2 responses to “Sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones”

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