Meanings
- A 2000s controversy around the change of the typeface from Futura to Verdana in IKEA's product catalogues.First known use 2000s
Swedish furniture retailer IKEA in 2009 changed its catalog font from Futura to Verdana, infuriating the design community and provoking a media storm, which became known as Verdanagate. Why? Because type matters.
2011, Alexei Kapterev, “The Slides’ Unity” (chapter 7), in Presentation Secrets: Do what You Never Thought Possible with Your Presentations, Indianapolis, Ind.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., →ISBN, page 1833 more examples
Like most of us here, I have been following the IKEA debacle over the switch from its proprietary Futura to the egalitarian Verdana as the corporate type family used from catalogs to store signage across the world. [see title]
2009 August 31, Armin Vit, “Verdanagate”, in Brand New, archived from the original on 02 Sep 2009The New York Times joked that ‘it was perhaps the biggest controversy to ever come out of Sweden’. Wikipedia wasted no time in accepting a new page called Verdanagate. It became the hot topic – the fontroversy – in Graphic Tweets.
2010, Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, London: Profile Books, →ISBN, pages 81–82Meanwhile, during ‘Verdanagate’, unbridled fury was unleashed after furniture store Ikea made what it thought was an innocuous switch from Futura to Verdana. Its customers picked up on it immediately and were chewing their little pencils in disgust.
2013 April 30, Etan Smallman, “To Helvetica and back: Our love/hate relationship with typefaces”, in Metro, archived from the original on 01 May 2013
Origin
Cite this entry
Verdanagate. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Verdanagate
“Verdanagate.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Verdanagate. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Verdanagate,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Verdanagate.
Source: Verdanagate on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.