I cannot contain my smörgåsbord of fury.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1919127,00.html

Meanwhile the economy is in a slump, the world is on fire, and the middle east in embroiled in war.

I'm glad the article mentioned the Coke vs. New Code thing, because that's exactly what popped into my mind when I started reading this.

It's the power of the brand at its best (worst?). I can totally foresee this finding its way into case studies for marketing students as an amusing yet telling example of how important brands and brand identity really are--despite the multitudes of people out there dismissing "buying for the brand" as somehow a bad thing.

Actually, Sweden is just coming out of its recession and wasn't doing too badly in the first place. You know your country's doing pretty well when 35,000 people vote soley on the platform for illegal downloads, and fury is only raised at a corporate change of font.

So if Ikea goes with Comic Sans, there will be mass suicides?

If that happens, I think Småland will declare independence.

******* Swedes. I'll see them all burn for what they've done.

Ikea has fans?

I like verdana

my distaste for designers and anyone else who gives a good god **** about what font ikea uses knows no bounds....



WHAT!!!??? this is absurd... actually given that it may in fact "tarnish" ikeas credibility, i guess that makes everyone who cares absurd.

So do I. It's neat and tidy.

but it's meant for on screen display. it looks weird on paper.

Sometimes sans-serif fonts look nice on paper. My main use of Verdana is calculations at work done on Excel - anything with serifs looks plain weird on them

Never forget!

I like the IKEA font but if they need unicode support they need to use a font that supports it. Their only alternative is pay the guy who made the roman-only font to expand it to unicode support. Using a different font is cheaper and I can see why they would choose to do it over paying to add thousands of characters to their own font.

And I also can sympathize with wanting a unified, simplified way to produce all their promotional materials*. Using the same font everywhere would be a small step in the right direction for them, maybe (obviously I have only the vaguest sense of how they do this sort of thing).

* - Not sure if the article mentioned this but they use Verdana already for non-roman languages, and they want to simplify.

This isn't about serif vs sans-serif. There are plenty of sans-serif fonts that look good in print (Helvetica for one). Verdana was designed specifically for the pixel grid of relatively low resolution computer monitors, print is much higher definition which makes the font less readable (and pretty) than fonts designed to work well on paper. Verdana also looks terrible at bigger than 12pt which makes it completely unsuitable for headlines both online and offline.

Next you'll be saying you justify your text to both margins

I use 10pt Verdana on calcs usually, and on written reports it is expected that you justify to both margins (in fairness, those are normally in Garamond or something similar).

Whenever I meet someone that doesn't think punctuation is important, I put a big question mark next to them.

But justifying both margins decreases legibility... Oh wait, it's a report, they're for writing rather than reading.

In boxes!

http://www.ikea.com/no/no/catalog/products/94180210

he's heating up

My God...surely these are the end time!

Blërg.

who gives a hoot about typography anyway

Freelancer does!

does it help?

Most engineers can't write a legible report anyway, so the justification is usually moot

I am incredibly happy with my decision to do a History A-Level: I was forced to keep up my spelling, grammar and arguing skills. Most folk who did Maths and Physics A-Levels did Chemistry or Further Maths who went on to do Engineering and had relatively poor writing skills compared to people who'd done an essay subject.

It's one of those things that distinguishes me in interviews

Yeah, I did Englsh Language at A-Level and went on to get a degree in Theoretical Physics, and the general writing ability of my fellow physicists was utterly shocking. Quite a few are utterly unable to produce publishable material, just because of their writing. And it's not just spelling and grammar, it's the inability to perceive the appropriate style of writing and the ability to write in different styles. Spelling and grammar can be fixed by someone else (and academics often have secretaries to do just that), but papers have to be written in a very specific style so to convey research in the most unambiguous way possible (it must be as simple as possible, but no simpler) and this can't be done by someone not familiar with the work. If you can't write, you can't have a career in academia.

^^^yup!

I corrected a colleague's submission to become a member of the IStructE last week - most lines were highlighted with "clumsy" or "repeated words" or "overly informal - re-write" as well a few typos and what have you. He was very grateful though, I thought while I was correcting it "****e, he's going to kill me when he sees all these changes..!"