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Recently, Ikea unveiled its new catalogue, and designers began lament almost immediately. To laymen, the trouble is probably virtually invisible: Ikea has changed its official font from Futura–with its tony blueprint pedigree–to Verdana.

And then what? Verdana was designed as an on-screen font for Microsoft. And while it's serviceable in that context, it was never meant for print. Designers would liken that motion to driving a Honda Civic effectually a racetrack–certain, the Civic might be a fine family automobile, but it doesn't have the elegant technology required to race in the chief event. Ikea, with its history of design excellence, is supposed to know better. Fourth dimension and NPR have already reported on the controversy, and there's at present an online petition demanding Ikea reverse grade. Grrrrrrr.

Maybe all the hubbub strikes yous equally weird, but fonts have e'er inspired passions. Here are five more examples from history:

Germans argued for literally hundreds of years over which font was more German: Antiqua, or Fraktur. Antiqua was descended from sometime Latin typefaces; Fraktur was invented in the 17th century, and was used in Germany'south outset newspapers. Otto von Bismark wouldn't read annihilation that wasn't printed in Fraktur; on the other side, Goethe, Nietzsche and Jakob Grimm (of the brothers Grimm) all decried it, in favor of Antiqua. Hitler somewhen settled the dispute: The Nazi's banned Fraktur due to its (untrue) "Jewish" origins. (Nazi buffoonery, as always, was on full display; the dictate against Fraktur was printed in Fraktur.) The Allies then resuscitated the font, in the coin printed past their interim regime.

Helvetica is literally everywhere, from American Apparel to American Airlines. It even has a documentary devoted to it. And it still trails controversy, ranging from charges that information technology's insufferably bland and overused, to older polemics against the politics behind its cosmos. Before globalization was a household word, there was the International Fashion, and its aspirations to a universal design language. Helvetica was one product of that movement, and from the start, designers have railed against the homogenous, mono-civilisation it symbolizes. In fact, the only thing that pisses off some more than Helvetica is Arial–a knock off, again designed for Microsoft, which isn't equally elegant every bit the original.

Designers hate Comic Sans–again, a Microsoft production. Every couple of years, an article or a move springs up to fight it. In fact, the Wall Street Journal recently wrote a long-ish article on the history of this hatred. Every bit they wrote, "The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, most a
decade old merely stronger at present than ever, thanks to the Spider web. The mission: 'to eradicate this font' and the 'evil of typographical ignorance.'"

Typography disputes usually boil down to looks or politics. Only Gill Sans is something different. Information technology, and its creator, Eric Gill, are widely admired. But Gill was also a monster: Though it was covered upward in early on biographies, he admitted to sexually abusing his children, engaging in incest with his sister, and animality with his dog. Just like Richard Wagner and his infamous Nazi sympathies, Gill's works create discomfort–is it proper to savor the work of bad men?

Typographic history is filled with theft and credit grabbing, and one of the about famous examples is Times New Roman. The mainstream history of the face holds that it was invented by Stanley Morison, after he lambasted the Times of London for its clunky typeface in 1929. They challenged him to do better, and after years of blind alleys and hair-pulling, he finally produced Times New Roman in 1932. Merely some type historians allege that Morison really stole the blueprint from William Starling Burges–making Morison ane of the most successful credit-thieves in the history of blazon:

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Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/1342843/six-fonts-piss-people