Archive for the ‘typography’ Category

Sweating the small stuff

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

Outrage. Ikea recently switched corporate typeface, moving from Futura to Verdana across all their marketing, including their printed catalogue and ads.

To typography enthusiasts, this is like Mozart announcing a kazoo concerto. Futura is a type classic, skilfully designed by a master craftsman and demonstrating real artistry. It’s excellent for distinctive identity and brand work – so much so that Ikea had practically made it their own until now.

Verdana was created to act as body text on low resolution computer monitors. And it’s well designed for that purpose, but it doesn’t suit print work or any size above petite. At large sizes it looks plain fugly, with characters that appear juvenile at best. Use of Verdana in this way definitely constitutes bad typography.

The slight is all the greater coming from a company that has, to an extent, brought design into the lives of many people who previously believed it was the domain of turtlenecked pseuds.

Ikea’s reason was ostensibly to ensure consistent use of fonts across web and print platforms, and to ensure global compatibility across all languages. A strange choice, given that Verdana has notable deficiencies in its character set. However, it’s possible that Ikea isn’t as naive as we think. My colleague Paul Lloyd hypothesises that the switch is a deliberate ploy to make the company appear less expensive. It’s an old strategy: cheapen the aesthetic and the perception of price goes down. Plausible, at least.

By all means we can point, laugh and lament the lack of design skill at the company. However, some of the outrage has been ridiculous, particularly since we can never truly know the reasons behind the choice. Hell, there’s even a petition to reverse the change.

I believe that if companies make bad design choices that’s their prerogative. If I worked for Ikea, I would have fought tooth and nail to dissuade them from this choice – but no, I won’t sign a petition. Let them eat cake, and if design is as important as we say it is, the market will prove their mistake.

Herein lies my bemusement at the design community’s reaction. Behind the indignation, does any of us really believe that this typographic gaffe will affect Ikea’s sales? Is it really as egregious an error as we make out? Or are we merely acting out the stereotype designers fight so hard to shake off: the aforementioned turtlenecked pseud complaining that their soup isn’t hot enough?

Typography matters. Used well, it can elevate communication in astonishing ways. But, as Aegir points out, there are bigger design challenges facing Ikea and indeed the global manufacturing industry than choice of corporate typeface.

Design is about sweating the big stuff; hopefully even changing the world. Often that involves the small stuff too, but focus solely on the trivia and it’s hard to avoid becoming trivial yourself.

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Printing press workshop

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

A slightly shortened week, since Clearleft took Monday off for a day of printing press revelry at Ditchling Museum. Ditchling was, for many years, the home of sculptor, typographer and unspeakable pervert Eric Gill, and a large proportion of the museum is therefore dedicated to his work.

The first half of the day was dedicated to examining the museum’s collection and creating our own original works inspired by it.

I contented myself with the (terrifyingly precious) first edition of Gill’s Cantica Natalia, and was quickly absorbed in transcribing it and noting down the unusual trills and marks that aren’t represented in modern notation. My rather sketchy original work was a worms-eye map of a seaside town using only these odd musical ligatures from the score. Slightly Klee-esque, without the talent.

In the afternoon we got our hands extremely dirty playing with the Stanhope press. Jeremy and, who else, Richard probably got the best from it, beautifully setting the following plug for UX London in 60pt Baskerville:

My efforts were less successful, but I did manage to print a new header for this blog, which I will at least try to integrate over the next couple of weeks.

It was, of course, very refreshing to spend some time out of the office and learning more about the foundations of our industry. The other point I took from the day was a renewed sense of humility. Technology has made our outputs so much quicker and more reliable, but without the hard work, patience and dedication of centuries of craftsmen we would be far, far behind.

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The interrobang

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

A quick hurrah for my favourite typographic glyph, the interrobang.

Introduced by Martin K Speckter in 1962, it was an attempt to condense the overactive punctuation of incredulous sentences such as “You drank how much?!”. Although it never really caught on, it still has some support in modern Unicode and can be used in HTML: ‽

Although I love the quirky idea, part of me is glad it remains a typographic and grammatical curiosity. If it had actually been successful, there might have been confusing repercussions for chess notation. ! and ? are used to denote good and bad moves respectively, leading to more complex derivatives:

14. Nc4!? is interesting move, but one that is perhaps a little speculative
14. Nc4?! is a questionable move, but one that still has some vague promise

In the world of the interrobang, might this subtle distinction have been lost forever‽

More about the interrobang

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