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Nokia’s legendary font makes for a great user interface font
- siva7 1y agoI feel like the text font of that linked website makes a better user interface font than that of Nokia.
- r_lee 1y agoThe combined v's in a cross in w irks me though
- mananaysiempre 1y agoIt’s only an Inspect Element and a Google Fonts search away: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway.
- jarym 1y agoAnyone know what the license situation would be around using this font e.g. on a commercial website?
- wizzwizz4 1y agoTypefaces do not have copyright (though they can have design rights or trademark encumberment). Font files, the computer programs that implement typefaces, are protected by copyright and must be licensed.
- Karliss 1y agoDo not have copyright in US. If you are a serious business operating internationally things are more complicated.
- behnamoh 1y agoThis is why we can't have nice things...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoWhat if I write a tool that pulls all the vectors out of a font file, puts them in a new font file with a new font id/name, munges it up so they don't have the same hash? Shapes aren't software, and whatever fool judicial ruling set that precedent is ripe for some loopholing.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoThen your font will look awful, because there's a lot more to fonts than just the glyphs. (See the lettering on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pope_Francis_Tomb.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pope_Francis_Tomb.jp..., in the lower third of the image.) You cannot adapt the font's kerning or hinting software in this way, since that would be creating a derivative work: you'd have to take measurements from its output and reconstruct it that way, which is rather difficult to do without understanding. The ruling is not foolish: it's actually one of the more sensible aspects of copyright law imo.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoThe shape of letters, including their spacing, isn't protectable under US law. Kerning and hinting aren't derivative, because typefaces aren't creative works that anything could be derived from. >The ruling is not foolish: it's actually one of the more sensible aspects of copyright law imo. The bar is so low, I fear you might be right on technicality.
- craftkiller 1y agoI wouldn't know, because your screenshots are smaller than a postage stamp on mobile and your website prevents zooming in.
- peterleiser 1y agoThis
- mtmail 1y agoDirect link to the full screenshot. 1.8MB, 2624x1080 https://www.osnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot_20250821_232812-1.png https://www.osnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot...
- firesteelrain 1y agoReminds me a little bit of Solaris for some reason
- hedora 1y agoIt looks a lot like gnome 2. That was the last version informed by human factors research and user studies. Sun performed the research. It’s not a coincidence that things like mint and cinnamon are still being maintained.
- vdfs 1y agoIronically it's the latest version of Plasma KDE using Qt 6, took a lot of time to port it from 5
- johnisgood 1y agoOpenSolaris looked great, IMO. OpenIndiana looks the same (no surprise here).
- bestham 1y agoI can see what you are getting at. Reminds me a bit of their GTK theme Nimbus for the Gnome based Java Desktop System but also Bluecurve of Gnome 2 with Bitstream Vera. Perhaps it just looks dated?
- rootsudo 1y agoMany 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.
- jansan 1y agoIt was the main phone in Europe and the USA, but in Japan they had entirely different types like the Docomo P208, which were much smaller and pretty cool (although I never used one). I remember when I was on a business trip to Japan with a colleague from the US in 1998. He pulled out his (at that time already outdated) Motorola and the Japanese just could not believe how clunky phones could be.
- flkiwi 1y agoThe 6190 might have been the most successfully executed technological device I’ve ever had. (Also an American wondering about the assumption we didn’t have Nokia.)
- lstodd 1y agoI beg to disagree. The 5210 was the best, it was indestructible, cheap, kept its charge and still was functional even if you rode over it in your bulldozer. The 8110 was the second imo, but only for the style. And the 3310-ish were the runners-up. Cheaper than 5k series, and almost as useful.
- dlcarrier 1y agoMy brother drove over his Nokia phone with a car, and it cracked the screen. It was still readable enough to place and receive calls, and it was very easy to repair, but it did take damage.
- johnisgood 1y agoWhen it comes to Nokia 3310, it is a huge dealer of damage, not so much of a receiver. :D
- diabllicseagull 1y agoonly a very few fonts evoke nostalgia like this one.
- delta_p_delta_x 1y agoUI 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.
- homebrewer 1y agoNo, Inter is fantastic, it is the only typeface that produces legible text on one of the monitors I have with DPI a bit lower than 82 (I know...) I look at most fonts that get recommended here and it's immediately obvious they weren't tested on low end monitors at all (which is what most people I know use). (As an aside, Cascadia is the only compact monospace font that looks good on this POS. Other good looking typefaces are too vertically stretched — oversized x-height.)
- delta_p_delta_x 1y ago> most fonts that get recommended here and it's immediately obvious they weren't tested on low end monitors at all Most new typefaces aren't, I concede that (especially the ones developed on Macs), but older ones were developed on monitors with lower pixel density (or even CRTs), ergo my point about good hinting.
- amelius 1y agoWhy must a UI use the same font on low DPI displays as on high DPI displays?
- Kwpolska 1y ago
- tangue 1y agoIt 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.
- DrNosferatu 1y agoIsn’t the pixelated version basically the same as the Mac classic font?
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoI can definitely see the resemblance to Charcoal[0] and to a lesser extent Chicago[1]. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal_(typeface) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal_(typeface) [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_(typeface) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_(typeface)
- DrNosferatu 1y agoYes, I guess I meant Chicago.
- bitwize 1y agoNokia'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.
- magnio 1y agoI 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.
- chrismorgan 1y agoErik Spiekermann was the designer for both fonts (well, the first-named of two designers for Fira Sans, but he seemed to be leading it). Not surprising if his personal style shows through.
- rozab 1y agoSpiekermann designed the Fira fonts for FirefoxOS, which in a way was a successor of Symbian. Fira Mono is still my favourite coding font
- piskov 1y agoFira is based on FF Meta, both of which have Spiekermann as a designer. He’s a legend
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 1y agoI don't know man, it does not look too good to me, a bit vertically streched.
- neurostimulant 1y agoOn 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 https://i.imgur.com/6nrYOeP.png Noto Sans (default): https://i.imgur.com/SgxI2qO.png https://i.imgur.com/SgxI2qO.png
- cluckindan 1y agoThere is: use a FontForge script to modify the font.
- prima-facie 1y agoGive Lato a try. I've been using it as the default UI font / sans-serif in Xfce for years and it worked well for me.
- stuaxo 1y agoOh, now I can't unsee it :D I wonder if it's something in the font that's deliberate, or if there is a bug somewhere.
- JohnDeHope 1y agoGod bless a capital I with crossbars.
- jonhohle 1y agoLove seeing a post from OSnews. Brings back so many good memories
- gertlex 1y agoI'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".
- mversiotech 1y agoSomehow I was expecting a website using the bitmap font (or whatever that was) used by Nokia phones in the late 1990s.
- opan 1y agoI think I was expecting the same.
- cyclingsnake 1y agoIndeed 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.
- cynicalsecurity 1y agoCtrl+F "license"
- dominojab 1y ago[dead]
- opan 1y agoI 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".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anikom15 1y agoBlurry? Sounds like a poor renderer. You may want to turn anti-aliasing off. What OS are you on?
- zdimension 1y agoI think "blurry" was used here referring to the fact that they don't really pay attention to the differences between fonts, not to an aspect of the rendering.
- opan 1y agoIt was kind of a double-meaning. Non-bitmap fonts really are blurry, comparatively. AFAICT the non-bitmap fonts just hide this thanks to people using HiDPI displays now, which is basically like saying "well, it looks fine from far away".
- opan 1y agoI have never encountered a non-HiDPI setup where non-bitmap fonts looked especially different or good, so I don't think my OS[1] is relevant. If you look at screenshots of classic Mac OS it has a beautiful timeless look to the fonts, that I feel I similarly get using Terminus in my terminals. I also wanted to list an old Windows version out of fairness, which would be 3.1, I guess, but when quickly looking up screenshots, it doesn't look quite as good as I want it to. Your first instinct that my setup is wrong when I'm commenting on the state of fonts as a whole tells me you're probably used to the blur. Most people who aren't already a bit weird about their terminal fonts don't seem to understand or at least don't seem to care when I talk about the blurry font problem. [1] But I'll tell you anyway so I don't seem like an asshole. I'm using Guix System GNU/Linux and the Sway Wayland compositor on my primary PC at the moment.
- dcrazy 1y agoFWIW, 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.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y agoNote 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.
- nsteel 1y agoAnd 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/media-library/nokia-logo/ https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/media-resources/medi...
- kragen 1y agoIt would be nice to see some font specimens of Nokia Sans, Nokia Sans Wide, and Nokia Serif.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoI downloaded a few off of Google images, to include in my archives. Checked a few other fonts of random provenance and they all seem to have specimen images floating around too.
- dolmen 1y agoN800 nostalgia.
- prmoustache 1y agoI'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/ https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
- stuaxo 1y agoTrying 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.