Printing/Publishing

Recommendations from Cost Saving Committee

1. Double-sided Printing. The committee encourages the use of double- sided printing when appropriate but recognizes that an overall mandate on this matter is presently inadvisable on several grounds. First, the obligation to provide all staff and faculty with duplexing printers would be excessively costly; there has existed for several years the FES-IT policy to install duplexing printers when requested or when clearly appropriate, but in some cases it has proven cost-effective to provide staff and faculty with non-duplexing printers, especially when they require color printing. Further, although double-sided printing saves on paper cost, it is unclear as to whether there are any energy savings, or if in fact there may be energy use disadvantages. Finally, the maintenance cost of duplexing printers is higher than for non-duplexing printers.
    
2. Poster Design and Production. It is clear that a number of administrative units and student groups spend a significant amount of money on the design and production of event posters. We propose to offer poster templates to obviate the need for expensive design consulting, and to consider poster size guidelines that correspond to Yale standards. We are working on specific template themes that incorporate FES graphics, but are also recommending the use of the many templates within Microsoft Publisher, which is included in our School-wide Microsoft Office Professional site license.

The communications subcommittee intends this initiative on poster design and production to be a prototype for further efforts to reduce similar costs for other FES publications.