IKEA has made the decision (about a month ago) to change their signature logo font (a customized version of Futura) to Verdana. Yeah.....Verdana
The Futura adaptation has long been an integral part of the IKEA brand until the debut of the 2010 catalogue. The cheap but stylish home furnishing store has swithced to what they see as a "more functional typeface" - causing an international design backlash. The night of the big Verdana debut, the font fauxpas drew more tweets than Ted Kennedy.
Some quotes from various "typofiles" include:
"IKEA, stop the Verdana madness."
"Words can't describe my disgust."
"It's a sad day."
"Horrific."
One design consultant, Marius Ursache, actually started a petition to get IKEA to change its mind.
It didn't work.
Why the outrage? It's purely an issue of propriety. Verdana was originally designed and is most functional when used on screen, not paper. Verdana has open letterforms with lots of space between the charactes to aid legibility at small font sizes (a.k.a. web use). At large sizes, Verdana is pretty much a mess, without any rhythm or elegance.
Others think that it's just straight up ugly. I mean, come on! It was a font that was esentially dumbed down for the limitations of web-use. Not printing sinage, p-o-p merchandise and catalogues - or even worse...billboards.
So why the change?
IKEA spokeswoman, Monika Gocic stated, "It's more efficient and cost effective...Plus it's a simple, modern looking-typeface."
In other words - they went cheap. They chose to use a inappropriate typeface, that's all over everything, just because it's a free typeface distributed by Microsoft.
Just because the store sells lamps and chairs for cheap, doesn't mean they have to make their company look cheap.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment