IKEA adopting Verdana is a bit perplexing. My initial suspicion was that the decision was intended as a strategy to unite the typography used in print to that on the web — Futura hasn’t achieved ubiquity on personal computers due to licensing restrictions. Unfortunately it seems the official reason is that the company wants to use the same typeface in every country, a fairly weak argument. If internal standards have suddenly become so dire, they surely could have found an opentype font — Helvetica/Arial perhaps — that is actually intended for viewing at the sizes the new catalogue is typeset in. On a related note, the website seems to degrade further from the brilliant concept Huge composed for them on a nearly daily basis.