Printout Pet Peeve

Here’s a pet peeve of mine (I got a million of ’em!) that’s kind of bothered me for a while. I didn’t really think of it as an issue for anyone other than me until a leader friend of mine said the same thing the other day.

GSUSA’s handouts and PDF downloads look great and are very attention-grabbing – for example, the new outdoor badges and requirements:

Well dang, Amy, what are you complaining about now?  Looks good to me.  It is awesome looking, and it’s all decked out in great colors and a wonderful design that someone obviously put some thought into.  Here’s the problem – it kills your printer when you need a hard copy.  It’s either print it off at home and use up your whole ink cartridge or take it somewhere to be printed, which is yet another errand to run.  (Or print it off at work.  Did I say that out loud?)  I’m as digital as you can get, but sometimes a hard copy is just better depending on the circumstances.

Here’s another example – a page from the Bronze Award Adult Guide:

Now that’s not that much color compared to the badge requirements.  But print off 13 pages of it, and it turns into a lot.  And that doesn’t include the cover which is just one page of solid color.  Even if you print a B&W copy, that’s still a lot of gray.

So how can this problem be solved other than making everything look really boring with all text?  I am not sure.  I usually try to think of some kind of solution or suggestion if I’m being critical.  Maybe make the pretty stuff available for downloading and then have a different copy of mostly text and a only a few graphics for printing?