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.
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.
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.
You can pay a font designer a fixed fee to create a font, just like you pay a programmer a fixed fee to work on Linux. Could be even $1 mil / font.
But perpetual licensing for a font, why?
Verdana/Futura, what about familiarity? Verdana is certainly more familiar to more people than Futura, and we know from psychology that familiarity has an impact in everything we do.
What if IKEA switched to Verdana because studies show that it's "better" for sales? Surely paying for Futura is a rounding error in their balance sheet.
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.
In much the same way, I'd argue that the Verdana typeface was a bolder and significantly more distinctive choice compared to something safe and well-trodden like Futura. Despite Verdana's widespread use on the web, approximately nobody had ever dared to use it in the way IKEA did, making it utterly distinctive.
Personally I think IKEA's shift to Noto was disappointing. At their scale they could have easily paid a type designer to make an IKEA Sans, inspired by Verdana, perhaps taking some cues from the likes of Raleway or Suisse Screen.
Sweden Sans only has characters used in Swedish; IKEA is global and needs glyphs for most latin languages, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (traditional and simplified).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
