Lecture 2

Design By Nature

Client: British Telecom Phonebooks, UK

'British Telecom manufacture 24 million telephone directories each year, consuming around 80,000 trees'. Colin Banks and John Miles were given the challenge to redesign the British Telecom phonebooks to reduce resource usage and enhance legibility and functionality. By reducing the typeface, including reducing the space of each letter and the spaces beteeen words a saving of 8% space was achieved, whilst further savings were achieved by increasing the columns from 3 to 4 per page. This inspired British Telecom's marketing campaign promoting the phonebooks as 10% thinner and the forests as 10% thicker.

All images and text sourced: DbN. For their website see link here

This is a great example of innovative design that fulfills a problem. While today - I don't believe that phone books should be printed at all - and that information can appear on the internet, i still think it is these types of design solutions that need to be exposed to show people how such a simple change can help.