I'd happily pay for the traditional physical IKEA yearly catalog. I suspect that if they sold it in-store for a few euros (€2?) just to cover printing costs, many people would buy it. It's more than a product list, it’s a cultural artifact, offering a window into the aesthetics, values, and lifestyle of its time. I still keep their old catalogs, and I’m not alone.

A bit OT, but why is ikea internet store (any country) designed to be so unusable? Lists of available components hidden in pdfs tucked in obscure menu, no way to find compatible components, search flooded with tens of thousands of "combinations" — I mean, they obviously know what they are doing. What is the goal of making it such way?

Scrolling through that page feels like an incredible speedrun of design history. You can literally see the decades fly by — the photography, layouts, and even the fonts slowly evolving until suddenly, around 2006, it all starts to feel “modern.”

I’m 37, and that’s exactly the point where it clicks for me — when things stop looking “old” and start looking like the world I remember stepping into as an adult. It’s fascinating how our personal timelines sync up with broader shifts in design trends.

Crazy how few of their decades old designs look "wrong" today. Their combination of high quality design, low price, and (depending on price...) workable to good build quality is pretty unique.

I was interested in when computers started showing up. I flipped through some years quickly. I see a terminal on page 158 in 1984 ('84:158). What looks like an 8-bit computer at '85:103 and a Mac at '86:190. Anyone see something earlier?

This could be a game. When was the first flat screen TV? When was the first CD rack? When was the first microwave?

There is a record player at '20:156. Did record players go away and then come back?

There are at least two typewriters in 2020 ('20:56 and '20:61). I wouldn't have expected typewriters in a 2020 catalog. Maybe that's a Swedish thing? Are typewriters still common in Sweden?

This is awesome! I wish Omega, Zenith, Seiko and other watch manufacturers would do the same and publish their historic catalogs online! And auto manufacturers, and really everyone who is in the kind of business where catalogs like this exists.

I recall being told the IKEA catalogue is the only publication ever to surpass the Bible in terms of annual print run (200 million at its peak)

These are amazing! I checked a few that around the era of some of my favourite TV shows, and I can totally see the "vibe" reflected in a couple of cases.

Also, as someone who enjoys to draw/paint, these are a great source of references!

One of these catalogs is connected to an interesting story that happened to me not long ago. The situation took place in Poland. I recently visited a friend’s house, and there my attention was caught by an old chest of drawers that must have been made during the communist era (the PRL period). I asked my friend if he knew what model it was, since there weren’t many such pieces made in those days — there are catalogs and auctions, so these things must be documented somewhere. He told me that he had already searched for it online but couldn’t find anything.

Out of curiosity, we moved the chest of drawers and looked behind it. There we found a small label with a production date (probably 1963) and the name of one of the Polish state-owned furniture factories. There was also the model name – quite enigmatic – and when I searched for it online, nothing came up.

The mystery intrigued me so much that I spent several hours going through old PRL-era catalogs and online auctions. After quite some time, I finally came across a photo on an auction site where someone was selling a similar piece – another item from the same furniture set. The description was very detailed; the seller even claimed it was a unique piece and included an extensive history of these furniture items.

It turned out that they were designed by Marian Grabiński, and the set was originally a wedding gift for Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA. Kamprad liked the gift so much that the furniture went into mass production – but only in Sweden. They were never available in Poland!

The auction also included scans from one of the old IKEA catalogs from 1964 (pages 111–114, see thread link). But how did these pieces end up in Poland? I don’t know if the Polish company actually produced them for IKEA, but according to the description, at least prototype series was made in Poland and distributed among some communist party officials in limited number. This was never available to buy in Poland.

As I later found out from my friend – his aunt actually was a communist party member and even held a fairly high position there so it made perfect sense.

Wow, i randomly opened the 1960s catalog and the furniture looks just modern... they would perfectly fit in a todays living room.

Either time stood still in the furniture industry, they did timeless designs or the 60s trends are just coming back.

But I didnt expect that.

What a coincidence to see this on the HN front page. I want to use these catalogs for a project of mine, but I first wanted to speak to one of the people of the IKEA museum or IKEA itself to inquire about permissions (outside of the ones on the website). I have been trying to get a hold of them for weeks now, but with no luck so far. If anyone here knows someone at those places, please let me know.

Love how the 2004 catalogue captures that iMac G3 colour scheme and vibe (even though, by then, you'd already gotten the more iPod looking G4).

When we try to remember how the design of a year "looks", it's surprisingly hard to document everything you were exposed to. I've been trying to find this particular graphics card demo animations I'd seen in computer stores in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I remember being induced into a right proper trance by some of them but I don't remember enough detail to find out what it was.

LACK is from 1979 according to IKEA but the first one I could actually find (purely out of curiosity) is in the 1981 catalog on page 68 (in 5 colors). It is also on the front cover.

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.

I feel like in the past, the furnitures have more color and soul and just furniture itself is enough to decorate homes, while newer furnitures are usually white and you need smaller and colorful things and more stuff to complete it - otherwise feels bland.

I was 13, delivering advertisement to mailboxes (basically a newspaper boy, but delivering to every mailbox).

Most weeks it was one bag for my route. Except when the ikea catalogue arrived… I went back and forth and back and forth — that thing was thick and heavy!

For the Brits here I spent an hour or so last Christmas looking at old Argos catalogues from before and during my childhood. Great fun.

The progression of the catalogue and furniture design from 1950 through to 1960 is remarkable. What a transformative time.

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)

Was IKEA furniture always self-assembled for the entire time? The catalogues are wonderful for how fashion changed, but I’d love to see the evolution of user-facing design in terms of simple, explained engineering.

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

Previously:

The IKEA catalogue through the ages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997461 - Oct 2021 (64 comments)

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

Someone is a Tested viewer...

So, can anyone find the mythical picture of Jeff Buckley in the 1998 catalog?

Other than the flower patterns on the sofas, 1976 looks pretty modern actually...

Where did the Eames chair lookalike disappear to after '68? I want one.

1992 what happened?!

holy cow I would have never guessed it went back 74 years! @_@

Was it only the English ones that got the dog penis?

I never realized that IKEA was over 80 years old.

Lack table forever

Hot damn. And downloadable as pdfs! Wasn't expecting this one...

The thing that has always driven me crazy about these catalogs is that I have an Ikea product that for the life of me I've never been able to find any reference to. So much so that I wouldn't even trust my memory if I didn't have an unopened set from 2002. It's called the GRILLBY, is a design by Gillis Lundgren, and it's a wire mesh wall mount kit for TRYGGVE shelves with hooks screwed into them.

I thought they looked like the bees knees when I saw them in the store, and the price must have been right because I bought a ton of them. I've been able to cover my walls with shelving ever since, but they must have come from the twilight zone. I've always wondered if the price was right because they were being discontinued and cleared out, but I can't find out when they were continued in the first place.

I'd be happy to hear if anyone has ever heard of anything like that.

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

Shrugging....