Says it all… From website called flowing data

Designers Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth looked at ink usage of some commonly-used typefaces, by hand-drawing them with ballpoint pens.

Scribble, scribble, scribble, and they got this simple bar chart with ink usage measured by, well, ink:

mpact font is such an ink hog. Such a drama queen.

See all the shots here.

[Thanks, @bambock]

design, ink, pen, usage

Social networks are getting huge. So big, in fact, that many of them are competing in size with some of the largest countries in the world.

To give you (and us) a nice and visual overview of how today’s social networks stack up against countries in terms of sheer size, we have put together this chart:

Some quick observations:

• Apparently the Chinese social network QZone is even bigger than Facebook.
• Facebook is bigger than Russia.
• MySpace is pretty close in size to Mexico.
• LinkedIn, Bebo and Xanga are bigger than Canada.
• Considering Twitter’s strong growth, it won’t be long until it’s bigger than Sweden.
• Orkut is larger (barely) than France.
• And finally: Does EVERYONE in the Philippines have a Friendster account? Both Friendster and the Philippines have a population of 90 million. We had heard it’s popular there, but still…

If we view the Internet as a virtual companion to the real world, then social networks could be considered countries in this virtual world. And as you can see, these countries are getting enormous. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years. How large can they get?

Data sources: Country populations are from Wikipedia. Social network sizes are always difficult to find reliable, up-to-date sources for, but we did our best: The numbers for MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, Xanga, Imeem, Last.fm and Twitter are all from Wikipedia. The QZone number is from here. The Facebook number is from here.The Windows Live Spaces number is from here. The LinkedIn number is from here. The Livejournal number is from here. The Orkut number is from here.

art, big, chart, design, graph, graphic, map, nations, size, social networking, statistic

A simple statement that means so much. As a designer I offer a service, for which I charge money. But what is the point for an entrepreneur or marketing manager to use my service? After all, they don’t want yet someone else taking home a pay-cheque at their expense. Their ambition is not to feed another wage-slave, but to make money. New money. Not just enough to pay the mortgage, but to go beyond.

Well, for starters, I’m an entrepreneur in my own right. After all, if I can’t deliver a product, I don’t get paid.

But I not only want to make money to pay my bills. That would be short-term thinking. After all, I have to allow for ‘quite’ periods ie. during the Christmas holidays etc and so always need to generate a lot more money at any one time, so that I can see through the lean times too.

So I’m in the business of making money. And the only way I can make money is by making even more money for my clients. Their investment in my services has to yield real and measurable returns. By understanding this and using my 20 years of media industry knowledge, my service is, quite literally, value for money. And that’s why I have many long standing clients who keep coming back for more of the same.

So all I can say to any new client who wants to know more about my services: Let’s make money!

business, design, enterpreneur, enterprise, money, prposition, wage-slave

“After Dutch holey cheese, there now is a Dutch font with holes as well.”

For printing there are great ways of saving money – and reducing your carbon footprint, by using Eco fonts, or software that lets you print with any font but still reduces the amount of ink used. Take a look at some of these sites:

• Ecofont
• Ecofont free font download
• Halftheink – though this is for PCs only (which is silly, as most design-for-print jobs are done on Macs).

Other things you can do:

Optimise web pages for print

Ever print a web page only to find your printout is full of ads, empty space and other junk you don’t want? PrintWhatYouLike is a free web page editor that gives you control of how web pages look when printed.  All you need to is:

• Enter the url of a page you wish to print
• Edit the page until it contains only what you want to print
• Print It! Only your modified page will be printed

There is nothing to download- everything runs in your browser, and it takes just a few clicks to remove the backgrounds or images.  Feel free to have a go at it as all changes are undoable.  You can even combine multiple web pages together – edit and print them as one document!

Pick the right font

Ecofont (mentioned above) is a project to optimize fonts for printing, without sacrificing readability.

Appealing ideas are often simple: how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink.

Automisation for printing

Greenprint is an interesting piece of freeware that scans through and helps to optimize the print layout.  With just a few simple clicks you can automatically tweak it so that you’re not wasting paper and ink.  The advantages to this over PrintWhatYouLike.com is that this works for printed materials outside web pages, but the disadvantages of it would be that you would actually need to install something not run it directly off the web.

So, what are you waiting for? Time to switch & save!

design, eco fonts, ecofonts, free, printing, save money, type, typographic, typography