4 ms·

For a while IKEA used Verdana as their corporate typeface, to the howls of despair from font aficionados everywhere. Personally, I loved it. I think it really

For a while IKEA used Verdana as their corporate typeface, to the howls of despair from font aficionados everywhere. Personally, I loved it. I think it really encapsulated the idea of it’s so bad that it’s good and really suited the “assembled at home“ vibe.

duskwuff 1y ago
I don't understand the Verdana hate. It's a decent screen font, especially at low resolutions. It may not be ideal for print, but that isn't what it was designed for.
- qu1j0t3 1y ago
  1) Overexposure. Same problem that Georgia has: Otherwise a very serviceable Matthew Carter design. 2) It's a screen font. In print and display applications, it really does look gross. Source: A Friendly neighbourhood typographer
  - Cockbrand 1y ago
    Two very relevent XKCD comics: https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/3113/ https://xkcd.com/3113/ Source: someone who picked up a bit of knowledge about typography, but never used it professionally
    - rbanffy 1y ago
      No curse is worse than having a fine taste for kerning.
  - criddell 1y ago
    > It's a screen font. With the pixel density of typical displays these days being as high as they are (phones are often 300-400+ PPI), I think this distinction isn't what it used to be.
- elevation 1y ago
  These days, Verdana is generally an indicator of either organisational decay or incompetence, especially when used in print, which it wasn’t designed for. It hasn’t been a default in tools for decades, so it suggests either the organization hasn’t been able to afford to refresh the design for 25 years or the designer is incompetent. Hate is a strong word, but Verdana is almost certainly the wrong font for your business branding in 2025.
  - simondotau 1y ago
    Sometimes, something that seems like an "obviously terrible decision" to subject matter experts turns out to be inconsequential, or perhaps even good. Ask a corporate identity expert in 1998 if you should name your big important company "Google" and they'd vomit in your face. Of course it looks very different in hindsight. Contrary to your claim, approximately nobody with a professionally designed corporate identity used Verdana in a printed context like IKEA did. It was a "wrong" choice like Google was the "wrong" name for a search engine. It's a perfectly serviceable font, like Times New Roman. And that font was good enough for The Times of London, for goodness sakes.
    - elevation 1y ago
      > approximately nobody with a professionally designed corporate identity used Verdana in a printed context like IKEA did Exactly my point. Verdana gives unprofessional vibes because a pro wouldn’t use it. In a Midwest town you’ll see a few sun faded signs, printed menus, and service vehicles emblazoned with Verdana. In every case, my assumption is that “the owner made our logo in PowerPoint in 1999 and won’t let anyone change it” or “the technician at the vehicle decal shop pick a font for us”. IKEA having used the font for a season isn’t enough to override the sense of neglect. If you’re designing print media for business, or a logo of all things, avoid Verdana.
      - simondotau 1y ago
        > Verdana gives unprofessional vibes because a pro wouldn’t use it. Exactly my point. The name "Google" gives unprofessional vibes because a brand identity pro would never approve that name. And because of those unprofessional vibes, nobody ever took Google seriously. In reality, font choice is a very surface level analysis. Ever since quality fonts became commoditised, it stopped being a significant signal of professionalism. A top designer could put Comic Sans next to Trajan and make it look like a million bucks; a bad designer could typeset in Gotham and still look like a high school student project. "Unprofessional font" is a dead meme.
- musicale 1y ago
  Verdana is underrated. It's a legible screen font, and I greatly prefer it to the dreadful spindly font (Segoe UI?) that Windows 11 uses.
  - lynguist 1y ago
    Which was recently replaced by Aptos!
    - currysausage 1y ago
      Aptos replaced Calibri in Word and Excel.
      - RedShift1 1y ago
        A terrible mistake.
- Y-bar 1y ago
  Wasn't this exactly what people were hating it for? IKEA used it for print and lots of large prints at that, not just pixel displays? I never said or wrote anything about it as far as I can remember, but I do think it looked worse than their previous typeface. Verdana is quite okay, if not good even, for body text. But it looks like they have changed or customised their typeface recently, the digits and letters like "y" do not look like standard Verdana any more.
- OskarS 1y ago
  Verdana isn’t terrible, it’s just that it’s so much worse than fonts like Frutiger and Gill Sans that inspired it (similarly to Arial/Helvetica). It’s screams ”free font that kinda rips off really good ones”, and for a giant company like IKEA, you’d expect them to do better. Especially since their previous typeface was Futura, an all-timer.
  - dist-epoch 1y ago
    I'm sorry, but since when do we hate on HN free alternatives to proprietary ones? "free Linux which rips off really good UNIXes" "free IDE which rips off really good IntelliJ" "free music production app which rips off really good Logic Pro"
    - OskarS 1y ago
      First off all, these fonts are not "free" as in "free software", they are owned by Microsoft and to use them you have to agree to a Microsoft EULA (technically, though this isn't enforced). They're "free as in beer", not "free as in freedom" (this is my understanding at least, welcome to be corrected on this point). Second: the objection isn't necessarily just that Verdana is free, it's that it's not a very good-looking font. Certainly in most people's opinion, it's nothing like as cool as Futura. IKEA, a massive multi-national company and an iconic brand, can and should do better. They say they did this to "align print and web", presumably meaning they wanted to use a font that was guaranteed to work in all browsers, but that's such a shame for print, really sacrificing great typography on the altar of browser support. Third: font design is an art and a craft just like graphic design, photography, furniture design, script-writing, music production, whatever. There are certainly people who think literally everything should be free (as in "every Hollywood release should be Creative Commons"), but that's a rather extreme position. If you think it's a good thing that IKEA pays graphic designers to design their catalog, and furniture designers to design their furniture, you should think it's a good thing that IKEA pays typographers for their typeface design. There are certainly issues with licensing in the world of typeface design (the emerging Monotype monopoly is really disturbing, for instance), but expecting giant companies to pay for good typography instead of using bad free typography is not some "anti-free software" stance.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
DonHopkins 1y ago
I appreciate how Slack stuck to their guns (so to speak) with the "swastika made of dicks" controversy. https://x.com/ItsBadvertising/status/1085972315094044672 https://x.com/ItsBadvertising/status/1085972315094044672 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-logo-design-backlash https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-... I'll never be able to unsee it. At least it doesn't spin.

duskwuff 1y ago

I don't understand the Verdana hate. It's a decent screen font, especially at low resolutions. It may not be ideal for print, but that isn't what it was designed for.

qu1j0t3 1y ago
1) Overexposure. Same problem that Georgia has: Otherwise a very serviceable Matthew Carter design. 2) It's a screen font. In print and display applications, it really does look gross. Source: A Friendly neighbourhood typographer
- Cockbrand 1y ago
  Two very relevent XKCD comics: https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/3113/ https://xkcd.com/3113/ Source: someone who picked up a bit of knowledge about typography, but never used it professionally
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    No curse is worse than having a fine taste for kerning.
- criddell 1y ago
  > It's a screen font. With the pixel density of typical displays these days being as high as they are (phones are often 300-400+ PPI), I think this distinction isn't what it used to be.
elevation 1y ago
These days, Verdana is generally an indicator of either organisational decay or incompetence, especially when used in print, which it wasn’t designed for. It hasn’t been a default in tools for decades, so it suggests either the organization hasn’t been able to afford to refresh the design for 25 years or the designer is incompetent. Hate is a strong word, but Verdana is almost certainly the wrong font for your business branding in 2025.
- simondotau 1y ago
  Sometimes, something that seems like an "obviously terrible decision" to subject matter experts turns out to be inconsequential, or perhaps even good. Ask a corporate identity expert in 1998 if you should name your big important company "Google" and they'd vomit in your face. Of course it looks very different in hindsight. Contrary to your claim, approximately nobody with a professionally designed corporate identity used Verdana in a printed context like IKEA did. It was a "wrong" choice like Google was the "wrong" name for a search engine. It's a perfectly serviceable font, like Times New Roman. And that font was good enough for The Times of London, for goodness sakes.
  - elevation 1y ago
    > approximately nobody with a professionally designed corporate identity used Verdana in a printed context like IKEA did Exactly my point. Verdana gives unprofessional vibes because a pro wouldn’t use it. In a Midwest town you’ll see a few sun faded signs, printed menus, and service vehicles emblazoned with Verdana. In every case, my assumption is that “the owner made our logo in PowerPoint in 1999 and won’t let anyone change it” or “the technician at the vehicle decal shop pick a font for us”. IKEA having used the font for a season isn’t enough to override the sense of neglect. If you’re designing print media for business, or a logo of all things, avoid Verdana.
    - simondotau 1y ago
      > Verdana gives unprofessional vibes because a pro wouldn’t use it. Exactly my point. The name "Google" gives unprofessional vibes because a brand identity pro would never approve that name. And because of those unprofessional vibes, nobody ever took Google seriously. In reality, font choice is a very surface level analysis. Ever since quality fonts became commoditised, it stopped being a significant signal of professionalism. A top designer could put Comic Sans next to Trajan and make it look like a million bucks; a bad designer could typeset in Gotham and still look like a high school student project. "Unprofessional font" is a dead meme.
musicale 1y ago
Verdana is underrated. It's a legible screen font, and I greatly prefer it to the dreadful spindly font (Segoe UI?) that Windows 11 uses.
- lynguist 1y ago
  Which was recently replaced by Aptos!
  - currysausage 1y ago
    Aptos replaced Calibri in Word and Excel.
    - RedShift1 1y ago
      A terrible mistake.
Y-bar 1y ago
Wasn't this exactly what people were hating it for? IKEA used it for print and lots of large prints at that, not just pixel displays? I never said or wrote anything about it as far as I can remember, but I do think it looked worse than their previous typeface. Verdana is quite okay, if not good even, for body text. But it looks like they have changed or customised their typeface recently, the digits and letters like "y" do not look like standard Verdana any more.
OskarS 1y ago
Verdana isn’t terrible, it’s just that it’s so much worse than fonts like Frutiger and Gill Sans that inspired it (similarly to Arial/Helvetica). It’s screams ”free font that kinda rips off really good ones”, and for a giant company like IKEA, you’d expect them to do better. Especially since their previous typeface was Futura, an all-timer.
- dist-epoch 1y ago
  I'm sorry, but since when do we hate on HN free alternatives to proprietary ones? "free Linux which rips off really good UNIXes" "free IDE which rips off really good IntelliJ" "free music production app which rips off really good Logic Pro"
  - OskarS 1y ago
    First off all, these fonts are not "free" as in "free software", they are owned by Microsoft and to use them you have to agree to a Microsoft EULA (technically, though this isn't enforced). They're "free as in beer", not "free as in freedom" (this is my understanding at least, welcome to be corrected on this point). Second: the objection isn't necessarily just that Verdana is free, it's that it's not a very good-looking font. Certainly in most people's opinion, it's nothing like as cool as Futura. IKEA, a massive multi-national company and an iconic brand, can and should do better. They say they did this to "align print and web", presumably meaning they wanted to use a font that was guaranteed to work in all browsers, but that's such a shame for print, really sacrificing great typography on the altar of browser support. Third: font design is an art and a craft just like graphic design, photography, furniture design, script-writing, music production, whatever. There are certainly people who think literally everything should be free (as in "every Hollywood release should be Creative Commons"), but that's a rather extreme position. If you think it's a good thing that IKEA pays graphic designers to design their catalog, and furniture designers to design their furniture, you should think it's a good thing that IKEA pays typographers for their typeface design. There are certainly issues with licensing in the world of typeface design (the emerging Monotype monopoly is really disturbing, for instance), but expecting giant companies to pay for good typography instead of using bad free typography is not some "anti-free software" stance.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

DonHopkins 1y ago

I appreciate how Slack stuck to their guns (so to speak) with the "swastika made of dicks" controversy. https://x.com/ItsBadvertising/status/1085972315094044672 https://x.com/ItsBadvertising/status/1085972315094044672 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-logo-design-backlash https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-... I'll never be able to unsee it. At least it doesn't spin.