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;
}
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
I wish I could use it on my web application (I think), but my quick scan doesn't show any licensing information.
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.