Nokia Pure: Nokia's New Official Font
brandbook.nokia.com
brandbook.nokia.com
It's just frustrating that, just because we don't "like" Nokia, we can't talk about the actual story; everything has to be a referendum on WP7.
I assumed that was implied in the defense of the visual identity reformulation.
> I don't see what (...) Windows Phone 7, the company's overall strategy, the company's management has to do with the Nokia Pure typeface.
Nothing and that's the point. Why waste focus on a visual identity overhaul? Was it broken?
> Are you suggesting they should have put Bruno Maag to work on OS development
This is a false dichotomy. Why hire Bruno Maag in the first place when they, yes, need to hire developers (hardware and software) so they can make phones they can sell?
Nokia's problem is that it doesn't know how to compete with Google and Apple, not that it's resource-starved. Blindly throwing money at developers without an intelligent vision is how Nokia got into this mess to begin with.
When Apple redesigns its website or switches corporate typefaces, do you complain about Apple's abhorrent lack of focus? No. The people designing the website are not the ones who develop your software, so the iPhone didn't suffer from the redesign. The same is true of Nokia. This typeface doesn't make their hardware or software any better, but it also doesn't make it any worse — it's unrelated.
Fair enough.
> Nokia's problem is that it doesn't know how to compete with Google and Apple
I would point out that visual identity has very little to do with it.
> not that it's resource-starved
That pressure will increase in the future.
> Blindly throwing money at developers without an intelligent vision is how Nokia got into this mess to begin with
I agree with that - just throwing money on the problem won't make it go away. They hired an outsider (Microsoft) to give them a coherent vision. They should act on it.
And yes, redesigning every printed material and web presence is a small fraction of their overall budget, but is a loss of focus nevertheless and hardly an irrelevant expenditure.
The actual story is goofy no matter how you slice it. If someone wants to take a little potshot at WP7, where's the harm? We're really losing out to the vast and deep discussion that would otherwise be happening about Nokia's profoundly important piece of R&D here?
If you look at it from the perspective of 'hey, we designed this new font which we think is cool' then I wouldn't call it goofy.
The first thing Steve Jobs did when he got back to Apple was utterly gut the company of every single project that wasn't advancing the company's future. That's how you come back from the brink.
Or you design fonts. It just feels like moving around deck chairs to me. They don't have the luxury of dicking around on fonts. When your house is on fire, you don't pause to fold your socks.
Is this true?
I know they dropped the ball recently on smart phones but they still have a big market on dumb/feature phones. And there's a whole world of people who don't use or want a smart phone.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-ra...
Taking a status quo position and building their business around a commodity that was hot 10 years ago doesn't seem like the right way to guarantee Nokia's future.
What if the only way to douse the fire is to convince the firefighters that your house is worth saving?
Nokia Pure is a nice readable typeface, very appropriate for use on mobile devices, elegant in it's own way - but too bland. They should've saved some money and just said "Frutiger".
At least they aren't setting their logo in it.
[1] https://twitter.com/espiekermann/status/51173410415452160
How was the older typeface dated, other than being from 2002?
I wish I could use it on my web application (I think), but my quick scan doesn't show any licensing information.
P.S. Doesn't this new typeface somehow remind you of Windows Phone 7's one?
[1] http://spiekermann.com/en/nokia-sans-character/ [2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/21709201@N00/4263893860/
* Spiekermann's face is distinctive, but also dated; Spiekermann himself draws a comparison to Rotis in the PDF spec for the face.
* The face is complicated. Look towards the back of spec book for whole pages set in it. It draws a bit of attention to itself.
* In the same vein: it's complicated enough to require a serif and "wide" variation to make it work in all the settings Nokia needs type. Don't underestimate how annoying that may have been for people working at Nokia. One company I worked with ditched an identity that used Mrs. Eaves and Futura (which looked awesome, I thought) because no normal person could make a document look good in it.
The new face is all these things in reverse:
* It's trendy (yeah, to the point of being boring)
* It's simple
* It's all-purpose
And sure, at the end of the day, maybe they just wanted to refresh for the hell of it.
Also: remember that the cost to re-do all their docs in a new visual style will probably dwarf the cost of getting a face commissioned. If they were going to refresh the identity anyways (that's just something companies do once or twice every decade), and the cost of a Dalton Maag typeface is a tiny part of that, why not?
It's true that it has too many variations, but probably the new one will have as well. I doubt that only 3-4 variations will exist, there'll be more - for devices, for logos, etc...
A refresh of the identity is a must every once in a while, it's the only explanation I see why the old one should be changed ;), but I doubt that their old docs will be redone in the new corporate branding, only the currently used will be redone and the new docs will use it.
It wasn't just that they had "display type" and "copy"; users of the Spiekermann face might have needed to know a fair bit of typography to make things look good in it. It was intrinsically complicated, beyond the complexity of Nokia's needs.
font-family: 'Nokia Pure Text', Arial, sans-serif;
This is an insurmountable problem with branded fonts; they only work if you load the branded font on every computer that will ever brush up against it. This means your Word documents will look like crap when you send them to an outside company. This means your web site that proudly uses the font will look like... umm... some generic sans-serif font when you use it on your web page.
The problem is insurmountable because, to fix the problem, you will have to convince everybody in the world to install it on their machine, which will require you to release the font for unrestricted use. A custom company-branded font with unrestricted use is an oxymoron.
@font-face {
font-family: 'Nokia Pure Text';
src: url('/other_files/Brand_Book_v2.2_2011/Fonts/puretext/nokiapuretext-webfont.eot');
src: url('/other_files/Brand_Book_v2.2_2011/Fonts/puretext/nokiapuretext-webfont.eot?iefix') format('eot'),
url('/other_files/Brand_Book_v2.2_2011/Fonts/puretext/nokiapuretext-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
url('/other_files/Brand_Book_v2.2_2011/Fonts/puretext/nokiapuretext-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
url('/other_files/Brand_Book_v2.2_2011/Fonts/puretext/nokiapuretext-webfont.svg#webfont4UxFerZx') format('svg');
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
}
Really, when you get to the size of a company like Nokia, you're inevitably going to have an enormous marketing budget just for the boring stuff, like printing costs and designing the N+100th version of your N+100th product's N+5th slick. These are marketing dollars that are getting spent not out of ego, but simply to keep the train on the tracks.
Compared to those expenses, no matter how much it costs to engage Dalton Maag, it's still probably a rounding error.
Wouldn't you rather live in a world where big companies occasionally gave excellent typographers interesting problems to work on, rather than paying someone to round the corners on FF Meta or something?
If your products are actually good and/or desirable, you may discover that the marketing budget can be reduced and the surplus money be used to develop the next generation good and desirable products.
What, so, e.g. Apple don't have large marketing budgets... or that they're wrong to invest in marketing?
So I don't understand your point. Nokia spends a lot on marketing. Apple spends a lot on marketing. Nokia has a house typeface. Apple has a house typeface. Is it just "I don't like Nokia's products"?
Stop correcting people's grammar and spelling, stop assuming incompetence in others, stop nitpicking single words/phrases in thoughtful comments, and stop willfully misreading what others write (which is what happened here despite Thomas's deliberate efforts to avoid that very thing).
Elop used the burning platform metaphor. If it's burning, the sole focus of the whole company should be on building a new one.
A new corporate font is not a competitive advantage, will not make whatever new platform they build with WP7 more attractive to end users and is, thus, a waste of time and resources. The cost of having a font designed is tiny when compared to the cost of reformulating the visual identity of the company, something that's bound to happen.
Marketing should worry about selling as many current phones as possible and nothing else.
I can't see how a new corporate font fits in this panorama.
Your take on this baffles me. It's like you think the only functions in a multi-billion dollar company are the ones nerds care about.
The Bengals have crappy-looking helmets. They are also a crappy team. They should fix the helmets. Also the team. But the two don't really have a lot to do with each other; the Bengels still bring in millions of dollars, despite losing all the time. Meanwhile, let's make sure we're talking about the helmets when we mean to talk about the helmets, and the teams when we mean to talk about the teams. Because people make fun of people who judge football teams by their helmets.
Nice straw man. My argument is platform neutral. Nokia should focus on building phones it can sell. I would question their sanity even if they had chosen Android.
> It's like you think the only functions in a multi-billion dollar company are the ones nerds care about.
No. Their only function is to create value for shareholders.
Your analogy is flawed. Nokia has not a visual identity (or helmet) problem - quite the contrary - their phones look good, their printed materials and website look good. They have a product roadmap problem. S60 seems inadequate for current smartphone standards, which is tragic, because all things point to a smartphone-only market in a couple years. S40 is even more doomed in that scenario and MeeGo was going nowhere. They chose to go with WP7 and it will be hard enough to pull that off (it would be had they chosen Android, WebOS, MiraclePhoneOS or a mutant Symbian from an alternate future).
And yet, they decide to change their visual identity.
It's like Twitter, in the fail-whale days, deciding their problem was their logo and changing it to a green octopus instead of solving their scaling problem. Because, after all, cool logos are what sells stuff.
I actually checked my calendar, but realized it is still 2 days away.
T minus 2 days for the most ridiculous headlines of the year.