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The Font War: Ikea Fans Fume over Switch to Verdana

What

Ikea switches to… Verdana?

Excerpt

All this outrage over a font? For some designers, it’s an issue of propriety — Verdana, which was invented by Microsoft, was intended to be used on a screen, not on paper. “It has open, wide letterforms with lots of space between characters to aid legibility at small sizes on screen,” explains Simon l’Anson, creative director at Made by Many, a London-based digital-consulting company. “It doesn’t exhibit any elegance or visual rhythm when set at large sizes. It’s like taking the family sedan off-road. It will sort of work, but ultimately gets bogged down.”

Carolyn Fraser, a letterpress printer in Melbourne, Australia, adopts a different metaphor to explain the problem. “Verdana was designed for the limitations of the Web — it’s dumbed down and overused. It’s a bit like using Lego to build a skyscraper, when steel is clearly a superior choice.”

Comment

I have to wonder what they were thinking here. Microsoft has never promoted or recommended Verdana for print. Ikea’s cost justification is bizarre, I can’t believe Ikea was spending much on fonts. I’m sure the design company fees for making this change would have paid for fonts for the next million years.

Changing fonts is a normal thing to do for a company, and I really do dislike Futura, their old font. But Verdana? With all the beautiful fonts out there you choose one of the few fonts that wasn’t designed with the primary concern of looking good?

I don’t care enough about Ikea for this to be personal for me. But the fact that a big design company made this choice, it makes it feel like stupid is some sort of a disease and it’s spreading fast.