There are 26 letters in the Latin alphabet. More than merely letters, they are also characters, each possessing unique traits and qualities. And character is what makes a typeface great. Twenty-six characters details how Nokia's new typeface, Nokia Pure, was designed and developed by typography icon Bruno Maag and how it was crafted into a contemporary font. Twenty-six characters is also design inspiration, a specimen sheet, a rough guide to typography, and the tale of a global business undergoing radical change. All in all, it's a visual treat for type lovers and experts—and the first step in establishing a visual language.

For Bruno Maag, Nokia Pure’s designer, the world is black and white—from the typefaces he designs to the opinions he stands by. Famed among the type community for his outspoken aversion to Helvetica, Bruno sees himself more as a quiet craftsman, diligently combining form and function into beautifully usable fonts.

Iván Mato recently sat down with Bruno at Nokia Design London to discuss the genesis of the Nokia Pure typeface.

So, how did you find collaborating with Nokia?
It was really a question of doing, doing, doing, and rejecting, rejecting, rejecting—doing a lot of things to find out what you don’t want, in order to get to what you do want.

What really got the ball rolling was that Nokia had a hardcore deadline for the user interface (UI) environment. The UI needs to carry the brand really—at least, that was how I would see it if I was the boss of Nokia—so when we started to develop the criteria for what the typeface should do, we had to look at pure functionality: it needed to be legible at the smallest and largest sizes.

In that respect, the collaboration was excellent. Working with Nokia’s graphic designers was great because designers really like type and love the opportunity to be involved in typeface development because they can talk about form and details, and they don’t have to worry about strategies and stuff like that. Their feedback was brilliant, and they had ideas that we couldn’t have come up with ourselves simply because we haven’t got the user experience. Nokia’s designers played around with our test fonts and applied them to graphics, which gave us lots of indicators on how we could develop it and where we could change it to make the font work harder.

It was maybe only the second or third time that we’ve had such a strong collaboration with a client. Often when we work in a corporate design environment, we have the agency sitting between us and we’re regarded more as a supplier. I think we can actually contribute far more if we’re involved earlier on.

Did you look at Nokia Sans for inspiration?
We did look at it, and I think when it was originally developed for Nokia it was the right thing to do. And it’s still a very unique typeface—there’s a real confidence about the squareness of it, but it has very much of a 1990s feel about it. And, yeah, fashion changes, taste changes, and like any brand every 10–15 years or so you have to update to the latest way of how people perceive things. In the beginning we explored the idea of something a little more square, like a round character just kind of squared off a little bit so it becomes more solid in its expression. And we also looked at making the dots, like on the i, more squarish.

What happened to that?
We all just looked at it and we thought ‘nah’!

What’s so different about a bespoke typeface?
I think there are two big differences. One is the branding side and being able to apply your own emotions, and how you want something to be perceived—doing your own font design gives you control over that. And then there is hardcore business. You know if you go to a library you’ll start paying licences for this, for that and the other, and actually the cost absolutely rockets and spirals. It would be far beyond what it actually costs to develop this font now. Particularly the way Nokia wants to use the font—applying it on all the devices—you’d be paying millions and millions, for as long as you have that brand. So from a financial business point of view, it makes sense to have your own thing, even though the cost, because it all comes in as a lump, looks tremendous. But in the long term, in five years’ time, it’s actually not that much money and you’re going to have a valuable brand asset.

And on the design side?
You can almost achieve the expression you want with an off the shelf typeface; you can get very close to it but you will probably find that it’s never quite there. With a custom font design you get exactly the way you want it. Yes, something else may look similar but it’s not the same that a competitor may have. And people sometimes ask me: ‘But isn’t this a futile exercise because the person on the street doesn’t recognise one typeface from another? They can barely differentiate a serif from a sans serif’. I say: ‘Yeah that’s true, if you ask somebody the difference between two fonts they wouldn’t be able to tell you rationally, but emotionally they would tell you “oh this feels a bit nicer than this typeface” or “this feels inappropriate for the environment”.’

We did a font once for a business in dire straits with their branding. It was a serious issue for them, and part of the re-branding was a big typeface change. Two years after implementation, they started to see an increase in business and clients coming back to them saying: ‘I really like the typeface that you have. I can actually read this, it’s accessible, it’s friendly, it’s warm, it makes me want to do business with you’. But these are emotional responses, not rational responses, and I think that’s where the value lies in doing something for yourself. A lot of people ask me why, when there are millions of typefaces around already, do we need another one. I think there are hundreds of vanilla ice creams out there, but each one has its own specific flavour. I think as long as we are human beings and everyone is unique we will want different fonts. It’s like music.

Twenty-six characters: An alphabetical book about Nokia Pure is available in the Gestalten Shop.