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Ikea finally dumps Verdana in catalog

By MixDex Article may include affiliate links

Ikea has finally gotten the message that Verdana isn’t meant for print.

After sparking ire of designers and font nerds everywhere for switching to Verdana in its printed catalogs and signage in 2009, the company has switched to a custom version of Noto.

The reason behind the outage? Verdana is meant to be a screen font — not printed.

With the release of its 2020 catalog, Ikea is now using a font called Noto Ikea Latin.

The font appears to be derived from the open source Noto family, whose development was lead by Google.

Noto is notable (pardon the pun) because of a focus on being flexible to use in multiple languages.

That’s especially appropriate for Ikea, which not only sells internationally, but also names its products with diacritic-heavy names.

As of this writing, Ikea is still using Verdana on its website (which makes a certain degree of sense) although Google does offer select versions of Noto as a free webfont.

Ikea also slowly changed its in-store signage and price tags to Verdana. This included wayfinding signage and dimensional lettering above entrances and exits.

Earlier this year, the company announced a reworked logo design — and is slowly rolling it out, so a transition to Noto inside and outside of stores could be coming too.

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