the future vs futura

Friends keep sending me links to articles about Ikea’s recent decision to switch typefaces in their print and web catalogs from Futura to Verdana. I love the politics of type design and the role typefaces play in articulating and supporting brand identity, but I can’t help but feel that this whole debate is somewhat silly.

“Good” design is a lot about functionality, and if Futura wasn’t functional enough to serve Ikea’s evolving needs, than it needed to get the old heave ho. Futura, though beautiful and endearing in its optimistic egalitarianism and sans serif insouciance, was released in 1927, before the age of complex web layouts and catalogs printed in dozens of languages, each with unique characters and symbols not always available in every font. Award-winning typeface Verdana was designed for Microsoft Corporation by Matthew Carter in 1996, and was engineered with digital legibility at small point sizes in mind.  Its primary liability in the eyes of detractors is its generic look and ubiquity (on- and off-screen) in American visual culture…a sentiment frequently reserved for such hackneyed pieces of Ikea-designed furniture as the ever popular Lack side table, Billy bookcase, or Malm dresser.

The new version of Ikea's print catalog featuring Verdana originally spied at http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeclark/3830334115/

For their 2010 catalog, Ikea felt ready to look beyond Futura’s avant garde cache and accept the fact that the technological versitility of a typeface is perhaps more relevant to consumers’ contemporary lifestyles and the corporation’s (commercial?) concerns than its radical typographic politics.  Did they sell out by scrapping Futura’s iconically artful simplicity? If required to flip through an entire catalog in one sitting, I might have to agree.  But in addition to any romantic spewings floating around about the company selling the world a sense of good design, let us not forget Ikea is in the market of selling, period. To them, Verdana provided an appropriate design solution for their percieved problem with the layout of print- and web-based copy and its translation into the native scripts of the multitude of nations to which the company would like to sell its products.

Ikea's old catalog with Futura (L) and new one employing Verdana (R)

It makes sense that Ikea, not always a “font” of radically innovative design solutions and more a purveyor of economical, functional goods would select a typeface so utilitarian and lowbrow (while still elegant) as Verdana. Like their trademark flat packaging, switching typefaces provides another way Ikea can strive to keep the costs of their goods low, and their products accessible internationally–and shouldn’t that be the larger concern of the good design police currently clamoring for the brand to reinsate a technologically obsolete and uppity typeface to market those goods?