Ok, typefaces can help selling products, but they can also help build a suitable brand personality because people are feeling a lot about these little arbitrary symbol. But how much of this is actually build into the typeface and how much is just because the typeface has achieved a strong brand by itself?
IKEA’s “Verdanagate” crisis is a very interesting example: In 2009 IKEA changed the font on the IKEA Catalogue from Futura to Verdana which created an outrage in typography field. Surprisingly, several mainstream media such as Time Magazine, The Guardian, and New York Times actually picked up the story… ok, considering the fact that three IKEA Catalogues are printed for every Bible each year, perhaps we ought to consider how it influence design appreciation worldwide.
Despite the fact that a lot of attention was paid to the arguments and reactions of typofiles, the story wasn’t newsworthy because of the inherent qualities of Futura and Verdana, but because IKEA’s brand was under direct attack from respected opinion leaders:
- Co-branding and ideological fit: Both Futura and IKEA design are based on modernist ideals, while Verdana is a typeface created for screen representation by Microsoft, associtating IKEA with the eternal bad guy in IT journalism.
- Brand heritage: Futura is an old typeface from 1927 that IKEA had been using for 50 years, and even made a sligthly tweaked version (IKEA Sans). Changing the typeface could not only be seen as a betrayal of ideals, but also company traditions and culture. One of the most important aspects of branding from a consumer perspective is trust, because they know what to expect from the company, and because its trademark help them to easily choose products of the desired quality. Shaking up things create doubt and hesitation: if the company start cutting corners on small things like typeface design, what about the products?
- Exclusivity: IKEA originally switched to Verdana because it’s websafe. Unfortunately, it is also one of the free fonts supplied with MS Word. You can’t diversify your products by using the same typeface as everybody else. The most important aspect of branding from the company’s perspective is the ability to demand a price premium for its products, and being associated with badly written birthday invitations and poorly chosen clip-art doesn’t make things easier.
The Verdanagate crisis shows that typefaces most definitely ought to be considered as separate brands that especially typofiles associate with certain qualities, heritage and feelings. However, the unusualness of the story also shows that typeface isn’t really a concern to the general public. So the heritage and feelings should probably be taken with a grain of salt when talking with the experts.
Half a year later, Futura was actually included among the websafe fonts, but IKEA kept Verdana, and the editing community of Wikipedia decided that the Verdanagate was too non-notable to merit a separate page and moved the content to the IKEA page.
Interesting links:
Plugin for checking typefaces on webpages: http://chengyinliu.com/whatfont.html
I recently started on “Just my type” by Simon Garfield. It is a very enoyable book about typefaces, and I’m planning to start on a small series of posts on the subject, because this particular part of the design world has been nagging me for a while: Why can people get so angry about Comic Sans, and why can’t you use the powdery frailness of Papyrus without being hit by the chilly winds of dissaproving silence?
