CopyPasteCharacter.com. Fonts. Dafont.com. Essential Fonts For Designers 300 Free Truetype Fonts You Should Have. The Font War: Ikea Fans Fume over Switch to Verdana. Thumbing through his local Swedish newspaper, Göteborg resident Mattias Akerberg found himself troubled by a full-page advertisement for Ikea. It wasn't that the Grevbäck bookcases looked any less sturdy, or that the Bibbi Snur duvet covers were any less colorful, or even that the names given to each of the company's 9,500 products were any less whimsical.
No, what bothered Akerberg was the typeface. "I thought that something had gone terribly wrong, but when I Twittered about it, people at their ad agency told me that this was actually the new Ikea font," he recalls. "I could hardly believe it was true. " Over its 60 years, Ikea has built a reputation as a purveyor of inexpensive but stylish home furnishings, selling everything from leather sofas to chrome toilet-bowl cleaners. "Ikea, stop the Verdana madness! " IKEA's 2009 online catalogue uses the old typeface. IKEA's 2010 online catalogue features the Verdana font. All this outrage over a font? So why would Ikea make such a change?