IKEA changes font, image

By Eric Doctor     9/3/09 7:00pm

With more than 175 million copies printed every year, the IKEA catalog is the world's most-published non-fiction work, outpacing the Bible by more than three times. It showcases clean, modernist design at affordable prices, and for five decades not very much about the catalog has changed.Until now.

IKEA sent a storm of outrage through the graphic design world last week when their 2010 catalog, arriving on our doorsteps, was set not in Futura - as it had been since its inception - but in Verdana.

A corporation changing its typeface is not unusual; however, a change in typeface is usually part of a complete overhaul or update of visual identity. But IKEA still makes the same furniture, they still have the same logo and they still have the same color scheme. So why the change?

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First, a bit of history. Futura was designed in 1928 by Paul Renner as part of the Bauhaus movement of design. Futura is the quintessential geometric sans serif typeface ("sans serif" means without those little feet on the letters) - it is modernism incarnate. Because of its simple modernism, Futura fit perfectly with IKEA's visual identity: clean, no frills Swedish design.

Meanwhile, Microsoft released Verdana in 1996 bundled with Windows, Office and Internet Explorer, and later with Mac OS. English type designer Matthew Carter specifically designed Verdana for use at small sizes on the screen - the growing prevalence of the World Wide Web made such fonts necessary. There is nothing particularly remarkable about Verdana, except that it was very carefully programmed to maintain its appearance when rendered in pixels.

Because of its inclusion in both of the major operating systems, Verdana is what is known as a "Web-safe" font. Fonts on the Web only display correctly if the user has them installed, so most Web designers tend to stick to fonts that almost everyone has. As a result, Verdana is one of the most commonly used fonts on the Internet. And used in that context, Verdana is brilliant. But when people start using it in print media or at larger sizes, it screams of unprofessionalism, conjuring up images of terrible PowerPoint presentations and neighborhood barbecue fliers.

IKEA has opted to maintain a consistent visual identity across all media, including the Web. Doing so limits them to a handful of fonts that are bundled with both Windows and Apple machines - including Verdana.

The problem is, IKEA has taken one step forward in consistency, but several steps backward in quality. IKEA's signs declaring "great design at affordable prices" no longer reflect the modernist design aesthetic of their furniture.

Spokespeople for IKEA have dismissed those expressing disdain for the change, with Marketing Consultant Ivana Hrdlickova saying, "[W]hat's important is the message, not good-looking fonts." What Hrdlickova fails to understand is that the message is conveyed through good-looking fonts. By switching from decades of modernist sensibility to something everyone with Microsoft Office uses, IKEA has cheapened their message.

With Futura, we really could believe that IKEA was offering us great design at affordable prices. Now, they are nothing more than a blue warehouse with cheap things to put in your house.

Hopefully they won't change the font in their instruction manuals; the couches are hard enough to build already.

Eric Doctor is a Lovett College senior.

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