IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

I hadn't noticed the lack of printed IKEA catalogs until now. Seems like they stopped making them in 2021. They used to just appear in the mailbox. (I'm in Sweden. They were literally sent to every household in the country every year.)

I'm a fan of print layout catalogs over database driven web sites. Can't AI help with making an appealing paginated layout of a product database? I'd be happy with a 1 GB .pdf.

Edit: Shoutout to the electronics supplier Reichelt in Germany for keeping the catalog alive:

https://cdn-reichelt.de/katalog/01-2025/ (537 MB .pdf)

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#5

Post by waltbosz » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

Very cool. I wonder how much of that 1950s IKEA furniture has survived to today.

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#6

Post by BoredPositron » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

Woah...that brings back some memories. In a whole different timeline 22 years ago I was printing them for literal months. We did all European versions and it was 8 weeks of nothing but IKEA catalogs. They were highly optimized so for a language change we only had to switch the black cylinders. The whole IT was bonkers for the time we used SGI workstations for pre press and had like 100 bonded dial up connections for the mass of data. The pages came as TIF files and a catalogue was around 300GB. We were a rotogravure shop and did around 13m/s of 3-4 meters paper in width and around 4-5 kilometers in length. I think a whole run was 50 metric tons of paper. Good times but incredibly boring if the machine was dialed in.

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#7

Post by dfxm12 » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 5:00 PM UTC

Is there a reason IKEA doesn't bring back all of the classic designs from time to time?

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#8

Post by WillAdams » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 5:01 PM UTC

lysace wrote: post #4

I hadn't noticed the lack of printed IKEA catalogs until now. Seems like they stopped making them in 2021. They used to just appear in the mailbox. (I'm in Sweden. They were literally sent to every household in the country every year.) I'm a fan of print layout catalogs over database driven web sites. Can't AI help with making an appealing paginated layout of a product database? I'd be happy with a 1 GB .pdf. Edit: S…

No need for AI --- I used to work up automated typesetting systems for a previous employer --- feed in the database as a properly tagged XML file, provide all the graphics in a folder, and a couple of typesetting runs later, one had a fully paginated PDF w/ ToC and Index.

The problem is, no one wants to pay for this since no value is seen in such a paginated view --- even if AI could create such a typesetting routine.

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#9

Post by ta12653421 » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 5:05 PM UTC

Ah, Sixties are knocking! Steel, Aluminium, Glass & Leather.

Shrugging....

Re: IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021

#10

Post by lysace » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 5:07 PM UTC

WillAdams wrote: post #8

lysace wrote: post #4

I hadn't noticed the lack of printed IKEA catalogs until now. Seems like they stopped making them in 2021. They used to just appear in the mailbox. (I'm in Sweden. They were literally sent to every household in the country every year.) I'm a fan of print layout catalogs over database driven web sites. Can't AI help with making an appealing paginated layout of a product database? I'd be happy with a 1 GB .pdf. Edit: S…

No need for AI --- I used to work up automated typesetting systems for a previous employer --- feed in the database as a properly tagged XML file, provide all the graphics in a folder, and a couple of typesetting runs later, one had a fully paginated PDF w/ ToC and Index. The problem is, no one wants to pay for this since no value is seen in such a paginated view --- even if AI could create such a typesetting routine…

I mean, what I'm after is a page layout that is designed with compactness and readability in mind. Going from a product database to that requires quite a lot.

An example:

https://archive.org/details/mouserelectronic00unse/page/190/...