Nokia’s legendary font still shines as a modern UI font

Nokia’s design legacy goes far beyond its iconic phones. It turns out the company’s famous interface font still works surprisingly well in modern user interfaces.

A writer at OSNews recently experimented with using Nokia’s classic UI typeface as a system font on a desktop computer. The result? It worked so well that they ended up replacing their default interface font with it.

The font family, best known from Nokia devices and later refined as Nokia Sans (maybe even as Nokia Pure back in 2023), was designed with readability in mind, originally for small mobile screens. As a bit of Nokia trivia, the Nokia Sans typeface was created by the Erik Spiekermann but Nokia for some reasons went for Dalton Maag’s font who is a well-known designer, which developed the font for Nokia’s digital products and global branding. Spiekermann famously criticised the decision, arguing the original could have easily been modernised instead of discarded. Read more about that at Spiekermann’s blog.

Even today the typography remains extremely clear across different screen sizes and resolutions. It’s a reminder that Nokia’s influence wasn’t just about hardware. The company also invested heavily in design, and some of that work still holds up very well today.

 

Cheers kaizerAllen for the tip 😉