NokiaCopied

Most people still associate Nokia with phones, a business it had long left. At Mobile World Congress in February 2023, the company unveiled a new strategy built on networks meeting cloud, and a new identity meant to help customers see it in a new light. The pitch was B2B technology, not consumer gadgets.

Chief executive Pekka Lundmark was blunt about why. In most people's minds, he told Bloomberg and Fortune, Nokia was still a successful mobile phone brand, and that was not what Nokia was about. Reuters called it the first change to the brand identity in nearly 60 years. Lundmark had taken over in 2020 with a plan of reset, accelerate and scale; the logo marked the move from the first stage to the second.

The old wordmark, bold blue capitals unchanged in essence for more than half a century, was the thing everyone recognised. The redesign simplified its geometry and abstracted each letter into thin, angular strokes, so that individually they barely read, and only together spell Nokia. That is the concept: a mark about collaboration. The heavy blue gives way to a kaleidoscopic, digital-first palette and bold imagery, which the design team says is meant to cut through the telecom sector's sea of sameness.

Nokia's announcement did not dwell on the outside designers. Its brand chief Stacey Brierley called the result a bold evolution of the 1960s classic, with letters that read as Nokia only when they act together. Meanwhile HMD Global, which licenses the name for phones, told The Verge it would keep using the classic logo on its handsets, so the old mark carried on in shops.

The trade press was divided. Creative Bloq grouped it with Kia's and The Verge's slashed letterforms and collected reader complaints about legibility, one noting that without context it might read as AOCIA, alongside others who praised it as sharp and forward-looking.

Conceptually it is tidy, and it does exactly what Nokia needed: the logo no longer looks like it belongs on a handset. But the thin strokes sacrifice the solidity that made the old mark feel trustworthy, and at a glance the letters can drift apart. For a company selling network infrastructure, that is a strange quality to emphasise, even if it is a deliberate one.