Dalton Maag's Nokia Pure Font Wins Graphics Award- Font Article-Fontke.com For Mobile

Dalton Maag's Nokia Pure Font Wins Graphics Award

Activity|The FontFeed|Yves Peters 2012-04-26 04:28:28

Last night Dalton Maag's type family Nokia Pure won the Graphics category of one of the most prestigious awards in design, the Design Museum Designs of the Year 2012. These 'Oscars of the design world' showcase the most innovative and progressive designs from around the world, spanning seven categories: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Product and Transport. Overall Design of the Year winner in this fifth edition – chosen from 89 entries across seven design disciplines – are British studio Barber Osgerby for their stunning design of the London 2012 Olympic Torch. The aluminium made torch will be carried over 8,000 miles and is perforated with 8,000 circular holes, each representing a bearer who will run with it in the London 2012 Olympic Torch relay in July.

Dalton Maag comments:

To say that we were surprised to be the category winners was something of an understatement. We just didn't expect that a font would be given such acknowledgement by the design community. Font design is often regarded as a bit uninteresting or not really thought about at all. Not only that but we were up against some very strong competition, including Blackpool's Comedy Carpet.

Bruno Maag's reaction to the announcement of the win was one of delighted shock. His words when he got up on the stage focused on the courage that Nokia has shown, and its vision to invest in a typeface as the bedrock of their identity. The company has put intelligent design at the heart of everything they do, across languages and cultures. The award for Nokia Pure is a testament to the people at Nokia who understand that good design has value beyond pounds and pence.

Dalton Maag was asked by Nokia to design a typeface primarily for use in digital media (mobile devices and the web), which would also be versatile enough to be the cornerstone for all of Nokia's communications worldwide. In their own words, the new font family had to reflect the traditions of Finnish design: simplicity, clarity, functionality and beauty of form – in short, Pure. The clean lines of the letter forms make this a font that is easy to read with no unnecessary frills to distract from its message. As Dalton Maag have added script systems to the font, they have carried through the essential character of the font and kept the ethos that this is a font about legibility and purity of design.

Developing Nokia Pure Indic scripts.

Beyond that Nokia Pure is, quite simply, a very special typeface because of its impressive reach. It currently supports 15 different script systems, covering the languages of about 4 billion people around the world. Work continues on the project, with Tamil and Khmer being the latest scripts systems to be completed. It is providing a unified visual expression to the Nokia brand that can be translated across continents and borders, but it is also helping people to communicate by providing them with mobile phones that actually use their own languages and script systems.

Developing Nokia Pure Tamil.

Checking curves for Nokia Pure Tamil.

Nokia Pure is a huge project, both for everyone in the studio at Dalton Maag and our colleagues at Nokia, seeing it acknowledged with such a prestigious award is truly amazing for all of us at Dalton Maag. We're very proud to have been able to turn Nokia's vision into a real font that is designed and engineered to the highest specifications.