Students, Please Drink Sensibly

Memories of my freshers week back in 2007 are somewhat blurry. The reason for this is no surprise, the volume of alcohol consumed in those seven short days was more than i'd ever consumed before. What with the freedom of living away from home, the need to bond with new flat mate, (which of course needs to be done whilst under the influence) having only a little preliminary work to do ( "it doesn't matter in the first year, anyway" was everyones favorite rhetoric) and lots of (seemingly) free cash injected into my bank account all contributed to freshers being spent in a gloriously hazy state. Thankfully, I have been able to piece together some 'memories' of those nights out thanks to the colossal number of photographs that were taken, and subsequently uploaded and tagged on Facebook. We went out almost every night that week, and the one night that I opted not to go 'clubbing' (my friends were going to a school uniform themed fancy dress disco for goodness sake) I got the impression that I was being quite anti-social. I remember as freshers we were encouraged to go out and get drunk as often as we possibly could; every bar and club was vying for our attention, and everywhere you went people were pushing leaflets in your face promoting some bangin' night out, with 'freshers deals' ie cheap drinks. There was almost a sense that you were expected to get paralytic, with brownie points going to those who could tell the most amusing/disgusting story about what happened last night at so-an-so's. It got to be a competition. I even recall some students who had never touched alcohol in their lives due to religious commitments, suddenly abandoning their faith in favour of peer pressure, and getting blindingly drunk in order to fit in and act like a 'proper fresher'.

Freshers week has now been dubbed 'freshers fortnight', which makes for some delightful alliteration, but also doubles the length of time that your liver and your bank balance take a pounding before university work begins, putting the brakes on the extensive socialising a little bit.

But with such so much encouragement from bars, clubs and fellow students to get drunk, promoting the common message that alcohol is a prerequisite for a good time, what is being done to encourage responsible drinking? Well there is always the tiny voice at the back of your mind that tells you you'll regret it later, but that voice rarely wins. So what else is there out there that gives students the idea that drinking doesn't necessarily equal fun? The government always seem to be commissioning new advertising campaigns to inform us about the amount of units we should consume or the consequences of too much alcohol, but this voice always seems to get drowned out by the barrage of other contradictory messages aimed at students. The latest such campaign, launched to coincide with freshers fortnight, is plastered on phoneboxes all over the place, and looks a little bit like this:

The latest Drink Aware campaign, encouraging us to choose soft drinks instead of alcohol

The adverts, which remind us of some tempting alternatives to alcohol, take a different approach to previous campaigns, such as the 'Too much alcohol makes you feel invincible' and 'You wouldn't start a night like this...' campaigns which show the consequences of having too much to drink, instead focusing on how to prevent getting excessively drunk in the first place. However, the second advert doesn't look like an anti-drink campaign at all, if you walk past this in the street it looks like just another generic Coca-Cola advert. There are a couple more adverts in the campaign, which can be viewed over at the Drink Aware website, but I can't help feel that such messages are too subtle; they're not attention grabbing or hard hitting like previous campaigns, and certainly don't think it'll be enough to convince this years batch of freshers to go steady on the alcohol.

How Things Have Changed

In an old antiques shop yesterday I happened to stumble across this old newspaper from 1948, and it's fascinating to see just how different newspaper advertising was 60 years ago. The newspaper, which I ended up buying, was a copy of the Illustrated London News from April 10th 1948, and the front page contains no headlines at all, instead it is full of advertisements. These advertisements rely almost entirely on text, so the typography plays a much more important role than it does in newspaper advertising today.

The Illustrated London News, 10th April 1948

A close up of the paper's illustrated masthead

My favourite advert is the one at the top for Bulmer's Cider, the very same Bulmer's which has in recent years seen a huge rise in popularity, helped by advertising campaigns both in print and on TV. It's interesting to see that 60 years ago, they were marketing it as "Champagne Cider" or "Pomagne", clearly trying to make it sound more sophisticated. This sophisticated/luxurious image is helped by the addition of the Royal Crest, a feature which I believe does still remain on Bulmer's bottles to this day, although now a lot less prominent. I cannot however, imagine "Champagne Cider de Luxe" adorning the bottles of Bulmer's I drink down at the pub.

This newspaper is also an fascinating example of how the art of copywriting has changed. The adverts shown here use very different language to entice the customer than would be used today. Describing the customer as "discriminating" seemed to be common amongst advertisers of the time, for example in these two adverts for Basildon Bond notepaper, "Always the choice of discriminating people", and Harden's Tea, "For the discriminating".




I also love the copywriting on this advert for King Six cigars, which states "The quantity available for distribution is still, unfortunately, insufficient to meet demands". It's a reminder of a bygone era of advertising, but I think it's a shame we don't see a little more like this in newspapers today.

Ikea Causes An Uproar

Right, I'll start with the controversial bit: Ikea has bid farewell to it's iconic Futura typeface, which it has been using for over 50 years, and has replaced it with Verdana. Yes, that's right, Verdana. Here's a quick before and after for you:

Before and after from Please Copy Me

However, before we get in to why Ikea have seemingly lost the plot, typographically at least, let's take a look back in time at an old Ikea catalogue, and how Ikea has developed as a brand. Ikea have actually been around for over 60 years, and first introduced their iconic catalogue back in 1951, although the oldest examples I can find are of this catalogue from 1965:

1965 Ikea catalogue (from ikke tikke theo)

The catalogue clearly hasn't changed much over the years; if you compare this 1965 example to the 2009 catalogue, they still retain a similar style and layout, with large, full page images of rooms, or close-ups of products on a white background, accompanied by the bold geometric letterforms of Futura.

Spreads from the 2009 catalogue

Futura has been consistently used for years (image from mgonamission's flickr set)

Ikea has been using Futura, in one form or another, for over 50 years, and the two have become almost synonymous. Some years ago, Ikea actually commissioned it's own corporate typeface, "Ikea Sans", which is a unique version of Futura, with more weights and a few slightly altered characters. They also commissioned an "Ikea Serif", which was based on Century Schoolbook, and the two have been used together in Ikea catalogues ever since, and have helped to make Ikea one of the most recognisable brands in the world. However, the 2010 catalogue uses Verdana throughout:






So why have Ikea unexpectedly made the decision to break off their ties with Futura and replace it with the rather odd choice of Verdana? Well, they say it's all about keeping the typeface consistent, whether the catalogue is for England, Russia, Asia, or online. They want to use the same font in every country, and with recent expansion into a number of Asian countries, this has not been possible with Futura. The other advantage of Verdana is that it is highly legible on-screen, and Ikea say that with their catalogue now being online as well as in print, Verdana was better suited to the job. There's no denying that Verdana is a good font for use on the web; it's one of the core web fonts, so is cross-browser compatible and very legible at small sizes, it was in fact developed for Microsoft by Matthew Carter specifically for use on screen. However, it was never intended for use in print, and at large sizes it looks rather clumsy and unbalanced.



Verdana has wide letterforms to make it easier to read as body copy on a monitor screen, but when used as a display face it loses all elegance; the terminals begin to look odd, and the kerning goes completely wrong. It's true that Futura/Ikea-Sans doesn't support characters for non-western alphabets, but surely there would have been a better choice than Verdana to unify catalogues around the globe? Many designers are suggesting even that it would have been wiser to commission a fully extended version of Ikea Sans with additional characters to support other alphabets.

A foreign Ikea catalogue from 2009, not set in Futura like the Western editions

The 2010 catalogue, set in Verdana

When the new catalogue was unveiled last week, it caused an uproar amongst the design community, with many bloggers criticising the move, and so many people mentioning it on Twitter that it made its way into Twitter's list of top trending topics. There is even an online petition to bring Futura back, which at the time of writing had 3,519 signatures. On the Typophile site alone there are hundreds of comments that have been made criticising the move to Verdana:

"Verdana is wrong on so many levels. It's less readable, prone to more clotting on the press or looking clotted, and forget about elegance. Myriad, Avneir, even Lucida or Vera would look much better"

SuperUltraFabulous

"I just couldn’t imagine a serious catalog design employing a screen text face for printed display work. I really think that this is a nasty case of a business being cheap"

James Puckett

"This is a disastrous move by a company that's supposed to be design-led! The use of Verdana has the unfortunate effect of making any design look as if it's been quickly knocked out on a home computer with no thought or effort, just because it's (usually) the default typeface on any Windows machine"

Richard Welsh

"Rubbish. It’s a screen font, not graceful at display size, and lacking in subtlety"

Nick Shinn

"To me, Verdana just screams “default.” I love it at small sizes on screen (and maybe even in print), but if it’s any larger or used in other applications it just makes me think of terrible PowerPoint presentations"

DrDoc

It seems to me a great shame that such an iconic brand, which has remained consistent for decades has suddenly decided to get rid of one of the elements which made it so distinctive, and clearly lots of other designers feel the same way. However, it is yet to be seen whether people outside the design community will bat an eyelid. To the ordinary Ikea customer who doesn't care about the difference between a font and a typeface, and has never even heard of leading or kerning, it probably just looks like a load of letters.

(If anyone is interested, there's a similar article about Audi who had a typographic change recently, moving from Univers to a Verdana-esque face).