Monday, August 31, 2009

Change It Back, IKEA.

The Verdana-Futura beat down is a big deal. Whodathunk it.

I’m a big Futura fan. Like Futura a lot of my work is based on classical proportions and is geometric. Futura conveys sophistication with simplicity which makes it a perfect choice for IKEA. Verdana used to be one of my favorites…when I was a sophomore in college. I liked it because I didn’t know any better. Like many of Matthew Carter’s well known typefaces, Verdana is designed to solve the technical problem of rendering fonts onscreen, not to convey artistic beauty.

There were rumors that IKEA chose Verdana because they wanted a unified graphic identity across all markets. I’ve seen conflicting information on this. If true, it is the only legitimate reason to use Verdana. However:

In Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Thailand for the languages Hebrew, Arabic and Thai, Tahoma is the approved substitute font. JhengHei, a Chinese sans-serif is the substitute font for Traditional Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong. YaHei will be substituted for Verdana in mainland China for Simplified Chinese. The Japanese sans-serif, Meiryo is being used in Japan and the Okinawan Islands while Malgun Gothic will be used in North Korea and South Korea. The Tamil language in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia and Mauritius will be displayed using Latha. Source

Second reason cited was cost effectiveness. If everyone switched to the most cost effective font on earth everything would be in Arial. Does IKEA really care about design? Apparently not. They have decided to be the Wal-Mart of the furniture world instead.

Verdana will be gone as soon as we get screens with higher resolutions. Renner wasn’t trying to solve a communications problem, he was creating a piece of art. Futura has stood the test of time, and has been used for different applications generation after generation. In 2123, we will still have Futura advertising space vacations and floating condominiums off the coast of Madagascar. Or everything will be in Arial. Your choice: Sign the petition.

posted by JDooley at 10:31 AM

4 Comments:

  • Not so sure about your prediction of Verdana's demise. It's a useful typeface because of its more or less sans serif look, yet its ability to make distinctions between 1, l and I is of a lot of value if one (1) must have something sans-serif; and (2) prefers disambiguation of one, ell and eye.

    That said, it is not an attractive typeface; it's just efficient. I tend to agree that the choice of Verdana doesn't indicate much good about Ikea's corporate direction.

    They were doing fine before. And there are plenty of other typefaces that will work every bit as well as Verdana, but be less generic.

    And, of course, there's always the possibility that Ikea could even consider hiring a designer (ideally a firm) to produce their own custom corporate typeface -- but that's obviously just pie-in-the-sky thinking now, isn't it? Sigh.

    By Blogger warren, At August 31, 2009 12:10 PM  

  • Warren,

    Thanks for your comment. I hope I didn't come down too hard on Verdana. As you said, its fine work for a difficult environment and I have lots of respect for Matthew Carter.

    I agree it would be great to see IKEA go with some custom type. Originally I thought this option was dismissed because of the Chinese, Japanese, Korean script complexities and significant investment needed to accomplish it, but apparently that is not the case.

    By Blogger JDooley, At August 31, 2009 3:33 PM  

  • The Verdana looks okay to me, but then I am mostly a book face aficionado. If there were a perfect typeface for me, it would be both satisfying to look at and impossible to see. Futura is great, though partly because the foundry rejected the art and stuck with the craft. The artworks get put back into digital versions, but that's like adding a bonus track to a CD -- it's not the waste of money that stocking matrices and types would represent. :)

    By Blogger Barry Schwartz, At August 31, 2009 7:48 PM  

  • This is a very interesting post, and the comments are also fantastic to read. I’ll have to have a little re-think about my own contact form on our new website, as this poses some interesting questions!

    IT developer

    By Blogger chandrabhan, At December 18, 2009 12:14 AM  

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