Many companies have house typefaces, and, if you're going to do that, you might as well have the page that says you got Bruno Maag to do it.
Really, when you get to the size of a company like Nokia, you're inevitably going to have an enormous marketing budget just for the boring stuff, like printing costs and designing the N+100th version of your N+100th product's N+5th slick. These are marketing dollars that are getting spent not out of ego, but simply to keep the train on the tracks.
Compared to those expenses, no matter how much it costs to engage Dalton Maag, it's still probably a rounding error.
Wouldn't you rather live in a world where big companies occasionally gave excellent typographers interesting problems to work on, rather than paying someone to round the corners on FF Meta or something?
I agree, actually, it is just that the timing seems rather bad. But of course they can not put their marketing staff on hold until they have a product worth marketing for...
> you're inevitably going to have an enormous marketing budget
If your products are actually good and/or desirable, you may discover that the marketing budget can be reduced and the surplus money be used to develop the next generation good and desirable products.
You missed my point, which is frustrating, because I lawyered up my (simple) point with a whole lot of extra words exactly to avoid this unproductive branch of the discussion.
Good people can be corrupted by bad influences over time. The douchebaggery on HN is at all-time highs and good people are being sucked in. I've got enough karma to spare that I'm happy to be downvoted to oblivion on this, but it's really got to stop.
Stop correcting people's grammar and spelling, stop assuming incompetence in others, stop nitpicking single words/phrases in thoughtful comments, and stop willfully misreading what others write (which is what happened here despite Thomas's deliberate efforts to avoid that very thing).
My comment was mostly about focus. Nokia has one single problem: they need to build phones people actually want. They have to develop the phones people will want in 2012 right now so they are shipping and working very well (Apple's iPhone has somewhat raised expectations) in 2012.
Elop used the burning platform metaphor. If it's burning, the sole focus of the whole company should be on building a new one.
A new corporate font is not a competitive advantage, will not make whatever new platform they build with WP7 more attractive to end users and is, thus, a waste of time and resources. The cost of having a font designed is tiny when compared to the cost of reformulating the visual identity of the company, something that's bound to happen.
Marketing should worry about selling as many current phones as possible and nothing else.
I can't see how a new corporate font fits in this panorama.
Because whether or not you like the fact that they chose WP7, they still have to publish many thousands of slicks this year, and they still have to have a website, and it may be worth it to have a coherent visual identity across all of them.
Your take on this baffles me. It's like you think the only functions in a multi-billion dollar company are the ones nerds care about.
The Bengals have crappy-looking helmets. They are also a crappy team. They should fix the helmets. Also the team. But the two don't really have a lot to do with each other; the Bengels still bring in millions of dollars, despite losing all the time. Meanwhile, let's make sure we're talking about the helmets when we mean to talk about the helmets, and the teams when we mean to talk about the teams. Because people make fun of people who judge football teams by their helmets.
> Because whether or not you like the fact that they chose WP7
Nice straw man. My argument is platform neutral. Nokia should focus on building phones it can sell. I would question their sanity even if they had chosen Android.
> It's like you think the only functions in a multi-billion dollar company are the ones nerds care about.
No. Their only function is to create value for shareholders.
Your analogy is flawed. Nokia has not a visual identity (or helmet) problem - quite the contrary - their phones look good, their printed materials and website look good. They have a product roadmap problem. S60 seems inadequate for current smartphone standards, which is tragic, because all things point to a smartphone-only market in a couple years. S40 is even more doomed in that scenario and MeeGo was going nowhere. They chose to go with WP7 and it will be hard enough to pull that off (it would be had they chosen Android, WebOS, MiraclePhoneOS or a mutant Symbian from an alternate future).
And yet, they decide to change their visual identity.
It's like Twitter, in the fail-whale days, deciding their problem was their logo and changing it to a green octopus instead of solving their scaling problem. Because, after all, cool logos are what sells stuff.
Just look how much free publicity Apple gets by having a legion of dedicated fans. Imagine how much money they'd need to get that kind of media/social media coverage if nobody liked their products.
And yet Apple still has a huge marketing budget (which really should be even bigger, except they put their storefronts in a separate part of the budget). I mean, yes, you need to allocate money differently depending on your market position, but large companies spend a lot on marketing, whether they're Apple or Nokia.
So I don't understand your point. Nokia spends a lot on marketing. Apple spends a lot on marketing. Nokia has a house typeface. Apple has a house typeface. Is it just "I don't like Nokia's products"?
