Typography Fans Say Ikea Should Stick to Furniture

They should have first taken everything out of the carton and made sure nothing was missing and that they weren’t mixing up, say, a Bjursta with a Leksvik or a Muddus. Then they should have taken a look to see how it all would fit together (serifs, strokes and counters), and only then should they have taken the many parts (stems, extenders, legs, spurs and chins) and started to jostle them into place, making sure they had enough help for heavy lifting when anything resembling pressed board was involved.

Instead they violated their aesthetic and their method: they went cheap (O.K., that’s part of Ikea’s appeal) but they also went pre-fab, ready-made. They even jettisoned their own distinctive, Swedish-owned design for something generic, multinational and bland. What good is designing furniture with coy names few outside your country can properly pronounce if you print a catalog describing those items using a font designed by Microsoft?

Yes, it’s fonts that we are talking about here, and as anyone who has seen the documentary “Helvetica” or fiddled with computer programs can tell you, there’s a big difference between Wingdings and Bauhaus. And there are many people who care deeply about the ways letters are given shape, how they descend below the line, where they get thicker or thinner and how elaborately they are ornamented.

So when Ikea casually abandoned its version of the famed 20th-century font Futura that had served it for 50 years and replaced it for 2010 with the computer-screen font Verdana, professional outrage was immense.

We tend to think of text as semantically invisible, the letters being mere tools used clearly to display words, which convey the true meanings. But no one who actually wants you to pay attention to those meanings risks thinking that way: advertisers, logo designers, magazine and book publishers and catalog creators spend millions on fonts because they know the medium has a message.

The design blog idsgn.org presented examples of the Ikea catalog’s look, before and after. At a quick glance they are more similar than distinct; after all, Ikea didn’t replace its own font, known as Ikea Sans, with anything like Comic Sans. But the differences rankled readers. “Yuck,” “sad,” “idiots,” “repulsive,” the comments read. “Do they want to look cheaper?!”

When the change was noticed, toward the end of August, Twitterers twitted mercilessly: “Words can’t describe my disgust,” read one from Melbourne, Australia. The comments grew even more heated on Typophile (www.honzon.com). An online petition pleading with Ikea to “get rid of Verdana” has a steadily growing list that on Friday contained more than 5,000 signatures, having nearly doubled in a week.

“We’re surprised,” the Ikea spokeswoman Camilla Meiby said. “But I think it’s mainly experts who have expressed their views, people who are interested in fonts. I don’t think the broad public is that interested.”

And what, after all, is the fuss about? All this, just because the Ikea catalog now looks a bit more like a paste-up job you could do yourself on a computer screen? What is the grand offense? And why care so deeply about a catalog even if the company says it went to 199 million households last year?

Ikea explained that it was abandoning its own version of the Futura font because it wanted one that would be effective in many different languages and on the Web, and that Verdana was designed for just that purpose. Microsoft released Verdana in 1996 as a versatile font for new technologies. On the screen, for example, differences between the lowercase i, j and l and the number 1 have to be clear. And the font has to be crisp even at the smallest sizes.

“The Verdana fonts,” Microsoft explains, “are stripped of features redundant when applied to the screen. They exhibit new characteristics, derived from the pixel rather than the pen, the brush or the chisel.”

Verdana, designed by Matthew Carter, serves technology not by seeming technological but with its leanness, height and loose spacing; it is bland, but efficient. The Ikea spokeswoman called it “a simple, cost-effective font.”