Pure type

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 | By Emily Gosling

In what seems like a rather unlikely collaboration, Design Studio, D&AD, Nokia and Finlandia vodka are coming together tonight to help present the Nokia Pure Exhibition, celebrating the launch of the new Nokia Pure typeface created by typographer Dalton Maag.

Refreshingly, perhaps, for a mobile phone company, the new typeface is really rather beautiful. Nokia Pure will become the company’s primary font used across 200 million phones worldwide.

Aapo Bovellan, Studio Nokia’s director of brand and marketing, says, ‘Nokia Pure is a celebration of our Finnish design heritage. We wanted to give it a natural, flowing form, while creating something that is highly functional and neutral. Nokia Pure has a clarity of purpose and as little design as possible. It’s made to celebrate human creativity.’

To mark the launch, a host of creative folk have come together to design a series of posters using the new typeface, which will be sold at the exhibition and online to raise money for the British Dyslexia Association.

The designers involved are Alex Trouchut, Bond, Build, Cartlidge Levene, Design Studio, Hello Von Nokia Design, Non-Format, North, Practice, Studio Myerscough, Value & Service, ZAK.

Proving that typography can titillate (who’d have thought?), Bond’s Marylin Monroe inspired design takes its cues from the female form. A Bond designer explains, ‘We wanted to undress the font and show some of its most beautiful aspects. Therefore, we created a series of ‘Nokia Nudes’, blondes, brunettes and redheads.

‘The design can be approached in many ways—some might see the ‘s’ representing the curves the female body, while some might see it as a skirt, just like Marilyn’s.’  Oooh-er.

Another DW favourite is Hello Von’s stunning, swirling and somewhat ethereal-looking ‘o’.

A Hello Von designer says, ‘To me, it was more interesting to steer away from a flat, graphic representation and treat the letter as an object or form in its own right, with its own quietly fluid internal world.’

Another standout is the clever, if time-consuming addition by Zak. The blue word search puzzle uses the Nokia Pure font to conceal eighteen words. The designers have kindly helped us out by spelling out ‘Nokia, ‘brand’ and ‘mirror.’ In a well spent morning, we’ve managed to root out ‘connect’, er, ‘mime’, ‘fluid’, ‘icon’ and ‘sxucad’, which apparently ensures 178 points in Scrabble.

The Nokia Pure Exhibition takes place on 24 March at The Tramshed, 32 Rivington Street, EC2A Posters will be available through DesignStudio,

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