Harper Collins Wanted to Save Trees While Publishing Books. Then They Came up With a Brilliant Idea
Even in the age of e-books, printed copies have their own allure as some avid readers are drawn to the feel of the spine and fragrance of paper. But these are also times to consider the environmental impact of our consumption, and opting for digital instead of print can save a lot of trees across the globe. But despite a significant rise in the quality of e-books in the past decade, only 3 in 10 Americans use e-books daily for reading, as reported by the Pew Research Centre. In order to cut down the environmental impact of printed books, publishing house Harper Collins has incorporated changes in its design.
As reported by Fast Company, the whole system needed to be overhauled, according to Leah Carlson-Stanisic, associate director of design at HarperCollins. For years the publishing house set aside particular fonts for every genre with historical fiction getting a font that expressed the time in which the narrative was set, while a book about technology was created with a more recent sans serif. “It’s 30% experience and 70% intuition,” she said.
The design team has zeroed in on fonts that will cause the books to be completed in a fewer number of pages. Apart from fonts, the team has also focussed on elements like the layout and the ink used in the process. Considering the competition in the industry, the publishing house has prioritized the reading experience through all the alterations. The chosen fonts have gone through many tests to ensure that customers have no problem reading the text in real-time. The efforts put in by the publishing house have saved 245.6 million pages, equivalent to 5,618 trees.
The idea took shape in HarperCollins’s Christian publishing division, Zondervan Bibles. It usually takes upwards of 2,500 pages to completely print a bible, and in 2015 the design team behind the Bibles decided to experiment with fonts to get this number down. They created a new compact typeface called the NIV Comfort Print, which is an easy-to-read font that allows readers’ eyes to flow smoothly along the lines of text. Tracey Menzies, the VP of creative operations was nervous while implementing. “When we first started thinking about this, it was a bit of an upheaval,” she said. “You’re taking something that people have done for their entire careers and telling them to think about it in an entirely new way,” she added. This innovation saved more than 350 pages per bible, resulting in a total savings of 100 million pages in 2017.
The team then began testing their findings on books other than the Bible and created 50 different versions of the same book with different fonts. The process incorporated many off-the-shelf fonts in its books, rather than custom ones. The trial and error method gave them 15 fonts which were both eco-friends and also didn't hurt the book's appeal. They managed to combine font with layout design and created a brilliant product, even though it took a long time. “When we experimented with these fonts, we realized they weren’t a limitation at all,” Menzies said. "It was simply a different approach that didn’t sacrifice aesthetics. Now, our designers are constantly questioning how we do things and thinking about ways to make things more sustainable."