History of the IKEA logotype - IKEA Museum (2024)

A time of experimentation

The evolution and history of the logo essentially follow the varied development of the company and its business. Ingvar Kamprad first registered a company, Handelsfirman IKEA, in July 1943. The business was based on traditional rural peddling, and the role of the emblem was to certify that the company could be trusted.

1950s

The word-group ‘Kvalitetsgaranti’ (quality guarantee) together with IKEA first appeared in 1951, in connection with the first home furnishing catalogue. The seal of quality was short-lived, disappearing a year later, never to be seen again. But the guarantee promise itself came to be a central aspect of IKEA and its brand-building.

In 1952, legendary head of advertising Gillis Lundgren redesigned the Sandström version, producing the embryo of the logo we know today. By this time the company was selling furniture in hardwood, a quality hallmark that was transferred to the colour of the logo. The word-group was now positioned diagonally and written in upper case only.

Occasionally, Möbel-IKEA formed a new word-group, often with an added ÄLMHULT, where the newly acquired joinery had been converted into a showroom – and this in itself was a modern development. The capitals were now here to stay. When the first store was built in 1958 in Älmhult (today the home of the IKEA Museum), one new development was a stylised picture of the building alongside different versions of the logo.

1960s

A professional production designer called Gillis Nilsson was now appointed to strip back and standardise the logo. The accent above the E was removed in 1962 and the logo’s font was redesigned, again by hand, to even more recognisable forms. The diagonal became horizontal, IKEA was put inside an oval and supplemented by various versions of ‘Möbel’ and ‘Älmhult’. The logo became black and white, and was framed by a rectangle.

IKEA was expanding, and when the store in Kungens Kurva opened in 1965, the words MÖBEL, IKEA and ÄLMHULT appeared beneath the emblem, which was now virtually the same as today’s logo. The original was made with ink and brush, of course, and the letters in IKEA were drawn with an in-house typeface based on an extra-bold Futura.

1970s to 1980s

IKEA grew strongly in Scandinavia, and a few years into the 1970s, the first store on the European Continent opened in Switzerland. Now, the words MÖBEL and ÄLMHULT also disappeared. The new international name IKEA stood alone in the logo, for example on the 1977 catalogue, where the wordmark appeared by itself for the first time, like a newspaper nameplate. More markets were added in the 1970s, and the turbulence of dramatic expansion also led to some graphical deviations. In Germany, for instance, the logo appeared with an exotic Swedish elk. In Austria they even stood a statue of an elk outside the store, while in Japan and Canada they used a stylised Viking. In Denmark, which did everything it could not to be associated with Sweden, they instead used a cheerful teddy bear to complement the logo.

The first manual

Due to the widespread graphical degradation, a necessary change process was eventually introduced in the 1980s. By now, the black and white IKEA logo had also been both red and white, and blue and yellow, with the addition of various characters. 1984 saw the first real visual profile manual, which clearly outlined the use of IKEA as a ‘trademark’ and IKEA as a ‘wordmark’. Also around this time, the trademark was registered (®), giving it official copyright protection for the first time.

1990s forwards

The small Småland furniture company IKEA was becoming increasingly global, and its catalogue would soon become one of the world’s most widely distributed printed works. From 1991, only blue stores with the yellow IKEA wordmark on the facade were built. A kind of giant logo, visible from afar – brand-building of gigantic proportions, literally. The name on the catalogue also appeared in the blue and yellow logo and the wordmark on the front page. IKEA had become a piece of Sweden, exported. Strangely enough, the red and white logo was kept in Scandinavia for many years. But there could be no doubt that it was the same company, even though the logo was in different colours in different parts of the world. Quite simply, the brand was stronger than the uniform.

Updated logo 2018

Before the most recent update in 2018, the logo had not been revamped since the 1980s. The latest changes were intended to improve legibility, and ensure consistent recognition and colour reproduction in the new digital age. Nowadays, the same logo has to work just as well on a mobile screen as on a store front or paper bag.