A 14-year-old student of Indian descent has found a way to save the US government about $400 million a year. So far it seems like the plot of a movie, a Hollywood story like there are many. The most interesting, and perhaps - it must be said - least cinematic thing about the whole story is that the way that the young Suvir Mirchandani has found to save his government all that money is extremely simple and very unadventurous: just change the font with which official documents are printed.
No more Times New Roman, then, nor Century Gothic or Comic Sans. No, the cheapest font, among those in vogue, seems to be Garamond. Thanks to the subtle strokes, it seems. The discovery, if you can call it that, is the result of a work spread over a couple of years. In fact, it was two years ago that young Mirchadani, after realizing that an ounce of Hewlett-Packard printer ink cost more than a Chanel number 5 (75 dollars an ounce), started a school project that aimed to reduce the waste of his middle school, Dorseyville Middle School.
His answer to the question went through a long research on the fonts used to print the numerous school circulars. By analyzing the most frequently used letters in the English language (e, t, a, o, r) using a specific software, Mirchadani came to the conclusion that Garamond was the font that allowed the least use of ink, due to – as mentioned – of his very subtle features. A savings of 24% to be precise: in a nutshell, if all the schools in the district had adopted that character, they would have cut their expenses by 21 dollars a year.
At that point, Mirchadani submitted his discovery to the Journal for Emerging Investigators, a journal founded by former Harvard graduates, which prompted him to apply his project to the federal government. The result? If all US state and federal government documents were printed in Garamond, the savings would be approximately $370 million.
