Ikea Catalog's Move to the Verdana Font Angers Fans of Futura | Hacker News Reader

Ikea Catalog's Move to the Verdana Font Angers Fans of Futura

nytimes.com

37 pointsojbyrne20 comments

Ikea didn't anger fans of Futura. It angered fans of typography.

Reasonable people could debate whether Futura looked dated and idiosyncratic. But almost nobody seems to have a defense for Verdana, which is a typeface that makes a number of concesssions for legibility at small sizes on a computer screen.

Worth reading though is Brand New blog's "Verdanagate" post:

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/verdanag...

Brand New certainly seems to think this is overblown. Gruber at Daring Fireball suggests that this is an elaborate ruse to get Ikea lots of attention and publicity from designers.

Agreed, this debate may sound silly to some, but for those of us that are passionate about typography, making this sort of change is akin to the movie studio going in and recutting Pulp Fiction to "make it better" or having the staff at the Louvre adding a little something to the Mona List to "make it better".

It's true that a film titled with Trajan shouldn't be retitled with Action Jackson (stereotypically 'classic' and 'hip, funny' fonts). And after perusing the 2010 catalog, I agree it looks considerably uglier in type terms, and that this is a mistake for a firm whose brand is partially built around the democratization of good design.

Then again, perhaps the lowering of aesthetic expectations will help to reduce the mild disappointment that accompanies appreciation of (most) Ikea products as ersatz and disposable substitutes for a level of aesthetic and manufacturing quality most of us can only aspire to. Verdana, then, may be regarded as a more truthful form of typographical communication, and signals a shift away from a petty-bourgeois dialectical proposition towards a more proletarian [You may purchase the rest of this article for $59.95]

Isn't it more like an annual Seattle screening of Pulp Fiction switching to, I dunno, Die Hard? Perhaps a change for the worse, but one you are rarely (if ever) actually affected by, and one the majority of people who are affected by it wouldn't care about?

Movies are a tough example because a LOT more people care about movies than fonts -- so perhaps many people would care about that switch -- but you get the idea.

No this is more like the movie studios making a new, not quite as cool, movie poster for Pulp Fiction for the re-release of the unchanged movie. The IKEA catalog is not their product, its their advertising. It's not like their catalog has any effect of the product (their furniture), much like a movie poster has no actual effect of the quality of the movie.

For non-subscribers:

Page 1 - http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/0...

Page 2 - http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/0...

Any chance a poll can be added to this one? I have to agree that the Futura "looked" much better.

However, their bottom-line reason for making the change is very interesting and compelling: Cross-branding and language independence.

This appears to be the classic sacrifice of aesthetics for functionality.

> This appears to be the classic sacrifice of aesthetics for functionality.

Like Ikea furniture.

The opposite of Ikea furniture, which sacrifices functionality (and robustness!) for aesthetics (and price).

I'm not a typography geek (or even a designer), but I'm fascinated with how passionate people can be about typefaces. The documentary mentioned in the article, Helvetica, blew my mind, mostly because of the passion/conflict/opinion that people have about something I take wholly for granted.

http://www.helveticafilm.com/

Warning: watching this movie may have self-image ramifications such as "Wow, did I just watch a documentary about a font?" :)

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788788

Honestly, both those fonts are terrible. Granted, nothing can match Verdana's sheer blandness and genericness; but Futura is a very.... lame font for a catalog - far too childish and silly. IMO, it was a good idea to change it, but definitely not to stick Verdana in its place.

Futura is "childish"? I've never heard it called that before. It's geometric, mechanical, and inhuman; to type what Metropolis was to movies, maybe.

nytimes.com angered me (a fan of nyt) when this was their top story on the front page yesterday.

Do those people treat the Ikea Catalog as some sort of bible? Ikea is a huge company, they surely have good reason to do this.

Ikea is a huge company, they surely have good reason to do this.

Not quite sure how the latter follows from the former...

Well, the IKEA Catalog has outpaced the Bible and become the world's most published work.

Font racism.

You have already started your inevitable downmodding, but I think you have a lot of truth to your comment. When people assail the change from Futura to Verdana, most give only their personal aesthetic preference for Verdana -- a pure assertion of its superiority.

I read that as "Futurama."

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