Nokia’s legendary font makes for a great user interface font

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

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

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

The combined v's in a cross in w irks me though

This

Direct link to the full screenshot. 1.8MB, 2624x1080 https://www.osnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot...

Not defending the site, but you can press and hold on the image, and open in a new tab. At least you can see full size and zoom in.

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.

Typefaces 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.

only a very few fonts evoke nostalgia like this one.

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.

It’s only an Inspect Element and a Google Fonts search away: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway.

It 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.

Reminds me a little bit of Solaris for some reason

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.

Does anyone know what's the rationale for doing this? It's annoying and defeats the very purpose of viewing an image or page. I consider it an anti-pattern.

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

"looks good on my machine"

No, 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.)

Doesn’t work for me on iOS Safari.

You can also just click the thumbnails and it shows the full sized image in a modal. I assume everyone here blocks javascript by default and would never know that.

And now the thread will be entirely dominated by pedantic complaints about the site's implementation, per HN tradition.

If I do that on the first screenshot it shows up even tinier than it was before for some reason

> 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.

It didn't for me, idk what your problem is.

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.

I've made sure to configure the browser to allow zooming on any website. Don't understand why websites try to block this.

It's not doing that for me on mobile, either, both Firefox and Chrome are giving me miniscule images when I tap on them. Switching to landscape didn't help either, where is usually might.

The 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.)

Same for me, Firefox/Android.

ricing

I 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.

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.

Pack it up, guys. It work on this guys machine…

That does not really help, as demonstrated: https://ctrlv.link/x9Ov

Sites just shouldn't disable zooming, it's one meta tag. The browsers shouldn't offer this option at all. There are no legitimate reasons to disable zooming.

Do not have copyright in US. If you are a serious business operating internationally things are more complicated.

It 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.

I like Inter mainly because it’s one of the handful that renders in a way that looks “right” to my eye regardless of platform. It’s bland, but incredibly consistent.

Lucida Grande is very nice for example but clearly designed for the OS X and iOS text rendering systems of its era and looks odd under Linux. Similarly MS UI fonts look weird in the absence of ClearType.

Erik 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.

I can definitely see the resemblance to Charcoal[0] and to a lesser extent Chicago[1].

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal_(typeface) [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_(typeface)

Spiekermann designed the Fira fonts for FirefoxOS, which in a way was a successor of Symbian. Fira Mono is still my favourite coding font

The Nokia branding is now owned by HMD Global, who recently announced they would stop selling Nokia smartphones.

I carry a Nokia smartphone as my main phone (G400) and I personally love it. It is really a no-nonsense kind of phone, they kept the headphone jack (which I use almost every day) it even comes with a charger, and it is one of the more affordable smartphones out there.

I really don’t understand what kind of a business decisions it is to own such a legendary brand with such as a rich and successful history and not use it.

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

Yes, I guess I meant Chicago.

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

My 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.

Things like this and sites wanting microfonts make me glad that reader mode exists that can strip all the styling. Reader mode exposes the image as an inline element you can easily tap to expand, then pinch to zoom.

On mobile, zoom can be annoying in certain webapps. It's easy to accidentally zoom in while playing a game, for example.

Is web the wrong platform for these types of experiences? Perhaps, but it's also the only way to avoid the walled garden.

When it comes to Nokia 3310, it is a huge dealer of damage, not so much of a receiver. :D

OpenSolaris looked great, IMO. OpenIndiana looks the same (no surprise here).

I am sure there are legitimate reasons to disable zooming. I do not like it either, of course, but off the top of my head:

- Websites relying on pixel-perfect layouts that do not gracefully adapt when zoomed

- Input Errors on touch devices

- Branding and aesthetics

- Embedded devices where a site is running in a controlled environment where zooming serves no practical purposes and disabling zooming prevents tampering, misuse, accidental UI scaling that disrupts normal operations

- Fixed-scale graphics or games where zooming distorts aspect ratios, crop controls, or even break gameplay mechanics

Because they want their website to look and feel exactly like an app. Because users expect apps, presumably. Because modern life is rubbish.

Fira is based on FF Meta, both of which have Spiekermann as a designer.

He’s a legend

Maybe it's your browser/phone restricting that?

Zoom works find on default samsung browser

https://imgur.com/a/brZ3FXP

Nokia lost a lot of the US market in the 00s. They insisted on shipping SIP clients on their phones, so US carriers stopped selling their phones, when most people were only aware of carrier sold, subsidy locked phones.

Out in the rest of the world, Nokia Symbian phones were the leading smartphone platform. In the US, almost nobody knew they existed.

What was the damage to the car? ;p

Why must a UI use the same font on low DPI displays as on high DPI displays?

God bless a capital I with crossbars.

Lucida Grande is so classy for a sans serif font! I always use it when I don't want to use a serif font.

This is why we can't have nice things...

Fira is great, but I've switched to JetBrains Mono and it's smoother on the eyes.

> I really don’t understand what kind of a business decisions it is to own such a legendary brand with such as a rich and successful history and not use it.

I bet $1000 that's mostly due to ridiculous patents, business contracts with term limits, poor managerial decisions, and possibly EU regulations that make it more expensive/harder to innovate.

There is: use a FontForge script to modify the font.

> They insisted on shipping SIP clients on their phones, so US carriers stopped selling their phones

This is a hot take if I've ever seen one. Completely ignoring the launch of the iphone in 2007 which coincided with their downfall. We could say yeah, maybe they didn't partner with CDMA and all the weird V-cast shit Verizon was doing and that hurt their market share like crazy, but to say SIP was the dealbreaker, just lol.

Also, Android shipped a native SIP client until this decade: https://www.xda-developers.com/android-12-killing-native-sip...

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

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".

I dropped my N900 so hard (by unsuccessfully grabbing for it as it was falling) that it cracked some the sidewalk's fairly brittle concrete. Had no effect on the phone, no case.

Ironically it's the latest version of Plasma KDE using Qt 6, took a lot of time to port it from 5

Nokia lost the North American market before the iPhone. Here's an article that discusses Nokia's 40%+ market share globally and less than 10% share in North America in 2007. It's hard to find US specific numbers from then. 2007 is a bad year, because the iPhone was released mid year, but I can't find a 2006 US number.

Having 10% in the US with 40% globally is a major problem. Tech journalism sells products and tech journalism is focused on the US market.

Here's a blog [2] reposting a no longer available article on smart phone marketshare in 2006. It points out that symbian was dominant worldwide, but only had 10% of market share in the US.

This is why this article says Americans might not know of Nokia. They were once a major vendor in the US, but US sales have been low since at least 2006. Symbian market share continued to grow worldwide after the release of the iPhone, but not in the US where it finished disappearing.

Of course, Nokia dropping CDMA in 2006 [3] and never releasing a Symbian CDMA phone doesn't help when half of the US was using CDMA.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563633/2007-was-a-blo...

[2] https://mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com/2007/03/smartphone-os-m...

[3] https://www.macworld.com/article/182913/sync_symbian.html

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

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.

Ctrl+F "license"

I don't disagree individually, but I felt like the 6190 was an excellent balance. If a 5210 (or 5190) rolled a 10 STR, the 6190 was a 9, but a 10 CHR if the 5210 was a 9. It looked good pulled out of an ubiquitous Targus laptop bag but was small enough to be carried in a pocket.

I mean, I'm not going to fault your choices. Reasonable people can disagree on the details here. We're talking about an absolutely stacked lineup here.

That’s not about fira mono/code, but proportional (not monospace) font for ui

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 clicked and the image opened to me

I think I was expecting the same.

Give 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.

It's probably because HMD Global doesn't actually own the Nokia brand. It's an exclusive licensing agreement with the still-existing Nokia company that makes network infrastructure.

The details are very easy to find out on Wikipedia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Global

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 want the font to change just because I moved a window from my high DPI laptop display to my external low DPI display.

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.

Most people place functionality over design, but there is no reason why you can't have it your way. Just make the fonts configurable. Your usecase isn't very common so I wouldn't make _that_ the default choice, though.

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...

How big were Nokia's smartphones in the US? The E and N series Symbian 60 phones?

Blurry? Sounds like a poor renderer. You may want to turn anti-aliasing off. What OS are you on?

My use-case isn't very common? Apple has been selling laptops with high DPI screens since 2012, and over in the PC land, many laptops that aren’t cheapo garbage ship with screens that run at 125% or 150% scale. On the other hand, many external displays run at 100% scale, or otherwise at a different scale than the primary screen.

I 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.

I think it's very common to have a large 1080p screen as a second monitor (projectors and TVs).

When pixels are that big, the readability of a good font allows you to actually use the extra space instead of just making everything huge.

Ok, in the Apple world choosing design over functionality is quite normal, I guess. Maybe things should work differently there. I don't know because I don't use Apple hardware and actually try to avoid it.

Anyway, I don't think that changing fonts on different displays is really a problem. If you're reading a book and a magazine, then switching between the two will also cause the fonts which you see to switch, and it's not like your brain has any trouble with it. Basically, your brain can quickly and easily get comfortable with the idea of looking at A and seeing font 1, and looking at B and seeing font 2.

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

In Nokia's heyday, very few people in the USA had cellphones. They were rare in my experience there until sometime around 02002. By contrast, in Japan and Europe, cellphones were ubiquitous. Probably less so in India and Nigeria.

I think that requirement is losing some relevance. I only use HiDPI displays these days.

Apple also switched to a font that looked pretty bad in low DPI, i forget which release it was but I think it was the San Francisco font.

SIP was useless over a mobile connection those days. 3G's latency was way too high to support a decent voice call. SIP only worked reliably over WiFi.

What 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.

I 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.

Very few units sold. Distribution was poor, most were GSM only and only a couple supported 850mhz. I had the E70-2 and later E61i but I never meant anyone else with one.

N800 nostalgia.