While skimming a National Geographic in the doctor’s office waiting room last week, I came across an article about a new font that promises to save the environment and save businesses money.

I couldn’t skip over the short article; I needed to find out how just poking holes in Arial could have such an effect on the bottom line.

The font looks like any other, with one exception — Ecofont, as it’s called, is pocked with little holes. The idea is that by poking holes in the characters, you save more than 25 percent of ink/toner over the regular Arial typeface. According to Ecofont’s creators, legibility is not at all affected.

The basic font is free, but if you want to transform your current custom font into an Ecofont, you will need to purchase software. (As of this post date, the software was not yet on the market. Check www.ecofont.com for availability.)

I’m not so sure it will change the world, but it is forward-thinking nonetheless. It highlights how something so simple — letters with holes — can make an impact.

Here are some other examples:

In May 2009, I wrote about a Norwegian electricity company that offered its customers a $400 discount if they dug their own fiber optic cable trenches. The effort was a success; the company went from 500 customers in 2002 to 130,000 in 2009. It also had a bonus side effect of increased customer loyalty. (Read the post, “Building Loyalty with a Shovel.”)

Earlier, in April 2009, I wrote about a USA Today article which stated that employees cost their companies $2.8 billion a year by simply not shutting down their computers at the end of the day. Who would have thought? (Read the post, “Wasting Money is Bad for the Bottom Line.”)

Making a significant impact with simple measures is what this company does, too — although it’s often hard to convince CIOs and IT leaders that paying for outsourced software support will save their firms money in the long term.

On its face, it may seem like an unnecessary expense, but when you consider productivity loss, downtime and costly mistakes due to lack of computer software training and support, hiring an outsourcing partner makes a boatload of sense.

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Jenny Sweeney econolypse Ecofont, National Geographic, Norway, USA Today