1) Overexposure.

Same problem that Georgia has: Otherwise a very serviceable Matthew Carter design.

2) It's a screen font.

In print and display applications, it really does look gross.

Source: A Friendly neighbourhood typographer

These days, Verdana is generally an indicator of either organisational decay or incompetence, especially when used in print, which it wasn’t designed for.

It hasn’t been a default in tools for decades, so it suggests either the organization hasn’t been able to afford to refresh the design for 25 years or the designer is incompetent.

Hate is a strong word, but Verdana is almost certainly the wrong font for your business branding in 2025.

Verdana is underrated. It's a legible screen font, and I greatly prefer it to the dreadful spindly font (Segoe UI?) that Windows 11 uses.

Wasn't this exactly what people were hating it for? IKEA used it for print and lots of large prints at that, not just pixel displays? I never said or wrote anything about it as far as I can remember, but I do think it looked worse than their previous typeface. Verdana is quite okay, if not good even, for body text.

But it looks like they have changed or customised their typeface recently, the digits and letters like "y" do not look like standard Verdana any more.

Verdana isn’t terrible, it’s just that it’s so much worse than fonts like Frutiger and Gill Sans that inspired it (similarly to Arial/Helvetica). It’s screams ”free font that kinda rips off really good ones”, and for a giant company like IKEA, you’d expect them to do better. Especially since their previous typeface was Futura, an all-timer.