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Many Americans such as myself had Nokia cell phones.. they were ubiqitious in USA culture... so I don't get the American jab at all, the only real competitor between 95-2005'ish was Motorola. Blackberry came from that time, and then android around 2010'ish but I would say yes - Nokia was the main phone for over a decade IMO.

UI has some very particular requirements—typefaces have to be hinted really well so that they work on displays with lower pixel density. Also, such typefaces generally have very tall x-heights so characters can be distinguished well, which can be seen in all the early 2000s UI typefaces, from this Nokia one to Lucida Grande, to Tahoma. More modern ones tone this down a little, at the cost of some character. SF Pro, Segoe UI and as the user mentioned, Inter are considerably closer to Frutiger and Helvetica.

Speaking of which...

> finally displacing Inter after many years of uncontested service

Inter is by far the blandest typeface possible—it feels like the designer thought 'let's take all the sans-serifs and smush them together'. Its several contextual alternates just dilute it even more. I would never use it for UI, let alone any sort of branding.

I can never seem to tell fonts apart or appreciate them unless they're bitmap fonts. I love a sharp, crisp, clean font. I can tell apart Terminus, Tewi, and Lemon. Everything else just falls into a blurry "other" category, it seems, unless it's very highly stylized. I had high expectations opening this article and then was kinda like "Where's the font? Is he using it in those screenshots? Looks pretty normal".

I see some similarity to Fira Sans, which IMO is the most underrated sans serif. It is legible yet quirky, but just enough so as to not be annoying or pretentious.

Somehow I was expecting a website using the bitmap font (or whatever that was) used by Nokia phones in the late 1990s.

I wouldn't know, because your screenshots are smaller than a postage stamp on mobile and your website prevents zooming in.

Nokia's legendary font WAS used as a UI font -- in Hildon, the UI theme for the Nokia Internet Tablets (and N900 phone?). It was beautiful. Hildon was based on GTK and ran on X11, and was one of the handsomest mobile interfaces you could get before the iPhone came out.

On Gnome user interface, the Nokia Sans Wide is off-centered. Especially visible in buttons and list. I wonder if there is a way to adjust it.

Nokia Sans Wide: https://i.imgur.com/6nrYOeP.png

Noto Sans (default): https://i.imgur.com/SgxI2qO.png

Anyone know what the license situation would be around using this font e.g. on a commercial website?

I've switched to Atkinson Hyperlegible next and mono fonts from the Braille institute on my desktops recently and highly recommend them.

https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

Indeed it is a beautiful font. There are certain things in products (or life even) that just work as expected; I don't appreciate them while using them, but as time passes, and with a reminder such as this blog post, I can retrospectively see both the satisfaction I had using them, and how they contributed to the experience of that product as a whole. Attention to detail is truly important I guess.

FWIW, there is only one weight of the Wide variant. That’s really isn’t enough for a UI typeface. Erik Spiekermann has a very healthy ego, and he doesn’t even bother hiding how clearly it was bruised when Nokia decided to commission a new family from a different designer instead of paying him to draw new weights of Nokia Sans Wide.

I don't know man, it does not look too good to me, a bit vertically streched.

I'm not a font person, but the font on the article site makes the zeros look like lower case o; feels like a decision trolling those with a peeve about fonts where 0O look the same. (this was particularly noticeable in the comments where folks talk about e.g. the Nokia N900) At the same time, I don't object to the font's style of having numbers that go below "the line".

Note that Nokia Sans only looks good on HiDPI displays. If you want crispness like on those old phones and you have a low-resolution display, you'd need somehow to scrape the bitmap font off S30.

Love seeing a post from OSnews. Brings back so many good memories

God bless a capital I with crossbars.

It would be nice to see some font specimens of Nokia Sans, Nokia Sans Wide, and Nokia Serif.

Trying it now, and it certainly is interesting, just seeing it in unexpected places like the URL bar in firefox, will keep it for now.

There doesn't seem to be a monospaced variant unfortunately, which could make for an interesting terminal experience.

only a very few fonts evoke nostalgia like this one.

And while we're here, how about a font based on their new logo? That would be a truly awful user interface font:

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/media-resources/medi...

It looks a lot like other Spiekermann’s font like Fira Sans or Meta Sans. Humanists fonts have been so overused by big corps that I’m not sure I want to have it in my ui.

Isn’t the pixelated version basically the same as the Mac classic font?

Ctrl+F "license"

I feel like the text font of that linked website makes a better user interface font than that of Nokia.

N800 nostalgia.