Nokia Releases Font That’s Designed To Work In Any Language

As part of the Finnish phone giant Nokia’s large rebranding initiative—London designers Dalton Maag have created a font that works in any language for Nokia. 

Called ‘Nokia Pure’, the multinational font is designed to accommodate alphabets of various languages, such as Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai. 

Nokia Pure was created primarily for digital screens and mobile devices, but will also be used for print across all Nokia’s communications. 

According to Daalton Maag, the new font family had to reflect the traditions of Finnish design: “simplicity, clarity, functionality and beauty of form—in short, Pure”. 

Designers started designing the font from the Latin language, as it “is the most widely-used script natively, by about 2 billion people globally. It sets the tone for the visual expression and functionality,” Bruno Maag, creative and managing director of Dalton Maag told Fast Co. Design. 

“There isn’t really a stylistic recipe for fonts to make them particularly suitable to be translated into different scripts,” he said. “Each script has its own calligraphic and cultural history. It is more a question of matching different calligraphic styles to one another, without the features of one script dominating another.” 

Character shapes and proportions of the font were kept open, and a study and in-depth research of scripts were done—ranging from the history of the scripts, calligraphy practice, and understanding of the letterforms’ construction. 

“In the design of this font we followed the mantra that a font is here to help a reader processing content, not to draw attention to itself,” Maag said. 

“When we design for non-Latin we always aim to create a rhythm and texture that is sympathetic so when you have two scripts running side by side, they create, ideally, the same tonal value on the page.” 

“With Nokia Pure the simplicity and mono-linearity of the script greatly helps to translate the design into different scripts.”