November 25, 2011 at 10:25Nokia Pure: clean typography
Today we want to talk with you about a slightly non-standard topic for us - typography.
We try to take care not only about the appearance of our devices, but also about how the interfaces of our software look. As part of the ongoing work on this, not so long ago a new corporate font appeared - Nokia Pure, which replaces many familiar Nokia Sans.
Font is being developed by Bruno Maag and several other type designers from his studio Dalton Maag. You are probably already familiar with the work of this studio. Publisher Dalton Maag last year released the font Ubuntu, which appeared in the OS version 10.10 of the same name.
Under the cut you can find both the process of creating the font (along with the problems that have arisen, but solved), and understand the personal relationship of the eminent designer to the modern font design. Oh, what a controversial person this is!
Bruno Maag is angry at modern typography. He hates Helvetica, comparing this font family with cheap ice cream: “If you imagine ice cream, then Helvetica is cheap, nasty ice cream made from water using substitutes and vegetable fats. The composition is poor and leaves a slightly funny aftertaste. ” According to Maag, something old-fashioned is felt in Helvetica: the font was based on the old Akzidenz Grotesk font family (1896), and everyone who calls Helvetika modern cannot be called modernists.
Bruno Maag began his career as a pupil of a typewriter in Switzerland, when newspaper editions were noisy, the design was made with a pencil on paper, and there was the smell of a hot calender around. Now he has his own studio in Brixton (south London), which is a quiet white typographic temple, where designers work in front of their monitors with a concentration of Zen Buddhists.
Working on fonts day after day makes you a pedant intolerant of imperfection:
“If fonts began to occupy an integral part of your life ... well, we all suffer from a slight mental disorder. Every line should be perfect, ”says Bruno.
Nokia Pure Text is a font family for the user interface that contains normal, italic, and bold font styles that are common to all Dalton Maag fonts.
Perhaps this is just the person whom you would invite to make you type. “To do quality work, you need a real creator,” says Maag. “You must be a designer who knows how color comes from and where there should be inflows. People appreciate the beauty of simple forms. You can do not only something beautiful, but also extremely functional. ”
Over the past ten months, the Dalton Maag team has been developing a new font for Nokia that best meets the needs of all digital media. The result is Nokia Pure: a font that reflects Finnish traditions of simplicity and purity, but at the same time, supporting such different alphabets like Cyrillic and Devanagari. This font was also completely unscrewed , so that from viewing it on mobile devices there was only a pleasant impression.
How many details from the old font were used in the new?
“In fact, we didn't use the previous Nokia font at all,” says Maag. - We started making the font from scratch. The old font was good, but it seems to me that it has outlived its own. It would be hard to work with him because of his rigor and expressiveness. It had too many individual traits. But we wanted to make the font softer and more functional. ”
Font creation begins with the design of the four defining characters: HO and NO. The Maaga is upset by young designers who immediately fall into the heat, full of enthusiasm and determination to create a font from scratch, starting from another set of characters. In the end, they discover that this step was a mistake, and they are forced to start all work again. “If you start making a font with the characters E or F, you won’t achieve anything. These four defining symbols represent 70% of the total process. They give you an idea of the proportions. And only when you make them and you will be happy with the result, you can begin to make other characters, up to a group of eight digits. For a long time you will switch back and forth between them, and only then will you be able to finish all the other characters. ”
Each font originates from sketches on paper, which are then transferred to the FontLab Studio application . After that, a long and complex technical process begins, during which you need to make sure that the font can be used on all computer systems. Hinting is the last and longest stage of this process, in which pixels are aligned on the grid for each character in the font. But it allows the font to achieve excellent display even on small screens.
The first version of Nokia Pure will support Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Thai alphabets, as well as Hebrew and Devanagari.
Ameli Bonet of Dalton Maag has a lot of dusty and tattered books in Hindi and Bengali. She received most of them on her research trips to India. In this, she is like a font archaeologist, not a designer. Make hundreds of ligatures- This is a colossal task, especially for those who do not speak the language presented. “The influxes and axes of ovals are everywhere different. If we do something wrong, it will look very unusual for the indigenous people. ” She carefully examines a number of symbols: “Devanagari is blocky, and the Bengali alphabet is sharp and round. Unlike the Latin alphabet, there is not much literature on these fonts, so we are trying to systematize what is. ”
Veteran designer Ron Carpenter works with the Arabic alphabet and Urdu. Like Ameli Bonet, he often speaks to native speakers to make sure the font looks correct and easy to read. Arabic font in the style of "Kufi" can most often be seen on signs and billboards; this is not the classic italics found in news newspapers. “In Arabic, there is a need to follow traditions, but the consultant who helped us with the design developed this idea even further,” said Carpenter. In the Latin alphabet, the width of the characters does not make sense, but for the Arabic language this does not work, so a lot of work has been done on the adjustment.
A large Arabic alphabet sheet is filled with hundreds of references to the Qur'an. A pair of brackets with annotations indicate a quote or reference to the Qur'an, and several characters standing next to it. They mean a greeting: "May Allah bless him."
The Nokia Pure font was developed taking into account the peculiarities of writing the Koran in Arabic and Torah in Hebrew, which means that in many countries of the world mobile devices began to play a significant role in the field of religion.
Now that the first part of the project is nearing completion, Bruno Maag begins to think about the next set of languages. He began to work on Armenian. “Not many people speak it,” he said.
The result of all these efforts was the Nokia Pure font - a sans-serif humanistic font, but with different outline thicknesses. Maag points out the small details that make this font unique:
“In the K, the lines smoothly converge to the main stroke. And look at M: the connecting strokes do not completely converge on the line of the main stroke. Tiny elements are decisive for this font, ”says Maag. He compares the line of two characters that only he can notice. “A strange influx on curve E and C. It doesn't look like a smooth curve - because of the influx pulling to the lower left edge. Such tiny details make this font really different. ”
He concludes with satisfaction: “Nokia Pure is not trying to scream, to be what it is not. And that makes him so beautiful. He looks good, he is simple, easy to read - he does his job. ”
We try to take care not only about the appearance of our devices, but also about how the interfaces of our software look. As part of the ongoing work on this, not so long ago a new corporate font appeared - Nokia Pure, which replaces many familiar Nokia Sans.
Font is being developed by Bruno Maag and several other type designers from his studio Dalton Maag. You are probably already familiar with the work of this studio. Publisher Dalton Maag last year released the font Ubuntu, which appeared in the OS version 10.10 of the same name.
Under the cut you can find both the process of creating the font (along with the problems that have arisen, but solved), and understand the personal relationship of the eminent designer to the modern font design. Oh, what a controversial person this is!
Bruno Maag is angry at modern typography. He hates Helvetica, comparing this font family with cheap ice cream: “If you imagine ice cream, then Helvetica is cheap, nasty ice cream made from water using substitutes and vegetable fats. The composition is poor and leaves a slightly funny aftertaste. ” According to Maag, something old-fashioned is felt in Helvetica: the font was based on the old Akzidenz Grotesk font family (1896), and everyone who calls Helvetika modern cannot be called modernists.
Bruno Maag began his career as a pupil of a typewriter in Switzerland, when newspaper editions were noisy, the design was made with a pencil on paper, and there was the smell of a hot calender around. Now he has his own studio in Brixton (south London), which is a quiet white typographic temple, where designers work in front of their monitors with a concentration of Zen Buddhists.
Working on fonts day after day makes you a pedant intolerant of imperfection:
“If fonts began to occupy an integral part of your life ... well, we all suffer from a slight mental disorder. Every line should be perfect, ”says Bruno.
About Nokia Pure
Nokia Pure Text is a font family for the user interface that contains normal, italic, and bold font styles that are common to all Dalton Maag fonts.
Perhaps this is just the person whom you would invite to make you type. “To do quality work, you need a real creator,” says Maag. “You must be a designer who knows how color comes from and where there should be inflows. People appreciate the beauty of simple forms. You can do not only something beautiful, but also extremely functional. ”
Last ten months
Over the past ten months, the Dalton Maag team has been developing a new font for Nokia that best meets the needs of all digital media. The result is Nokia Pure: a font that reflects Finnish traditions of simplicity and purity, but at the same time, supporting such different alphabets like Cyrillic and Devanagari. This font was also completely unscrewed , so that from viewing it on mobile devices there was only a pleasant impression.
How many details from the old font were used in the new?
“In fact, we didn't use the previous Nokia font at all,” says Maag. - We started making the font from scratch. The old font was good, but it seems to me that it has outlived its own. It would be hard to work with him because of his rigor and expressiveness. It had too many individual traits. But we wanted to make the font softer and more functional. ”
Font creation begins with the design of the four defining characters: HO and NO. The Maaga is upset by young designers who immediately fall into the heat, full of enthusiasm and determination to create a font from scratch, starting from another set of characters. In the end, they discover that this step was a mistake, and they are forced to start all work again. “If you start making a font with the characters E or F, you won’t achieve anything. These four defining symbols represent 70% of the total process. They give you an idea of the proportions. And only when you make them and you will be happy with the result, you can begin to make other characters, up to a group of eight digits. For a long time you will switch back and forth between them, and only then will you be able to finish all the other characters. ”
Each font originates from sketches on paper, which are then transferred to the FontLab Studio application . After that, a long and complex technical process begins, during which you need to make sure that the font can be used on all computer systems. Hinting is the last and longest stage of this process, in which pixels are aligned on the grid for each character in the font. But it allows the font to achieve excellent display even on small screens.
Heading East
The first version of Nokia Pure will support Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Thai alphabets, as well as Hebrew and Devanagari.
Ameli Bonet of Dalton Maag has a lot of dusty and tattered books in Hindi and Bengali. She received most of them on her research trips to India. In this, she is like a font archaeologist, not a designer. Make hundreds of ligatures- This is a colossal task, especially for those who do not speak the language presented. “The influxes and axes of ovals are everywhere different. If we do something wrong, it will look very unusual for the indigenous people. ” She carefully examines a number of symbols: “Devanagari is blocky, and the Bengali alphabet is sharp and round. Unlike the Latin alphabet, there is not much literature on these fonts, so we are trying to systematize what is. ”
Problems with arabic
Veteran designer Ron Carpenter works with the Arabic alphabet and Urdu. Like Ameli Bonet, he often speaks to native speakers to make sure the font looks correct and easy to read. Arabic font in the style of "Kufi" can most often be seen on signs and billboards; this is not the classic italics found in news newspapers. “In Arabic, there is a need to follow traditions, but the consultant who helped us with the design developed this idea even further,” said Carpenter. In the Latin alphabet, the width of the characters does not make sense, but for the Arabic language this does not work, so a lot of work has been done on the adjustment.
A large Arabic alphabet sheet is filled with hundreds of references to the Qur'an. A pair of brackets with annotations indicate a quote or reference to the Qur'an, and several characters standing next to it. They mean a greeting: "May Allah bless him."
The Nokia Pure font was developed taking into account the peculiarities of writing the Koran in Arabic and Torah in Hebrew, which means that in many countries of the world mobile devices began to play a significant role in the field of religion.
Now that the first part of the project is nearing completion, Bruno Maag begins to think about the next set of languages. He began to work on Armenian. “Not many people speak it,” he said.
The result of all these efforts was the Nokia Pure font - a sans-serif humanistic font, but with different outline thicknesses. Maag points out the small details that make this font unique:
“In the K, the lines smoothly converge to the main stroke. And look at M: the connecting strokes do not completely converge on the line of the main stroke. Tiny elements are decisive for this font, ”says Maag. He compares the line of two characters that only he can notice. “A strange influx on curve E and C. It doesn't look like a smooth curve - because of the influx pulling to the lower left edge. Such tiny details make this font really different. ”
He concludes with satisfaction: “Nokia Pure is not trying to scream, to be what it is not. And that makes him so beautiful. He looks good, he is simple, easy to read - he does his job. ”