On the way there I got a tip off that Ikea has recently changed it's display font from the elegant simplicity of Futura to Verdana, mostly used as a screen font. So a seemingly simple trip turned into a reconnaissance mission, a typographic study trip...
Ikea Coventry hasn't yet completely finished the branding excercise, most of the display material was still written in Futura, but there was the odd hint at the rebrand. I took a photo of one of the offending posters:
The supposed reason behind the rebrand is that Ikea want to use the same font throughout it's branding, from web to print material. To me, this seems like lazy typography. You need to choose a font based on it's end purpose, and Verdana just doesn't cut it when used at a large scale. I'm a bit confused as to why Ikea would spend the extra expense licensing the new font when the old one worked so much better. If it aint broke, don't bother fixing it.
I'm assuming they will be using the font on their instruction manuals too, items that are meant to make the headache-inducing process of putting their furniture together as simple as possible. Keeping the typography simple is key to a document like that.
The type debate is hotting up on the typophile forum, check it out here if you're interested in hearing more type geekery:
http://typophile.com/node/61222
I ended up buying far too many frames than I could carry yesterday; 19 to be exact, and when I came out of Ikea it was raining and had to carry them back to the train station and back home to Brum. My shoulders actually have dents in them this morning. Who says I don't suffer for my art!
In other news, I sold a Moseley Dovecote print to a lady in Sacramento, CA through Etsy. Very exciting.
There are lots of other exciting things happening in the world of becky at the moment but I shall drip feed these to you over the next few days.
Hope everyone's having a fabulous bank holiday!
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