TeliaCopied

Telia's previous identity, with its colourful Pebble symbol, was created by Wolff Olins in 2014. Eight years on, Telia was rebuilding its digital estate, moving its websites to a headless content platform, and wanted a brand that worked better on screens. Kurppa Hosk, which had just done Securitas and Heart, took the job.

The client was Emelie Westerfelt, group head of design. She told Telekomnyheterna the aim was to make the design more modern and inviting, better in digital communication and, above all, more accessible. The new typeface, Telia Sans, was designed to be easier to read even for people with severe visual impairments.

The changes are deliberately small. The logo mainly took the new typeface. The Pebble became calmer and cleaner, with a clearer lower stroke so it reads at small sizes. The purples were toned down, which Westerfelt said gives more depth in advertising and on the web. The streaming service C More switched from red to Telia purple to show it had moved closer to the core business.

MKSE reported the design starting to appear on telia.se in late February 2022, and Westerfelt admitted most people had not even noticed after several weeks.

The rollout was deliberately frugal. Westerfelt told Telekomnyheterna that most people had not even noticed the new design weeks after it went live, and that it would be introduced gradually over a couple of years: advertising and digital platforms first, with shop signs updated only when they would have been replaced anyway, so the change would cost no more than necessary. Asked whether TV4 would also switch its colours as C More had, she said there were no such plans.

Telia Finland's own newsroom set the refresh, published on Friday 28 January, against a change that had been happening inside the company for nearly two years. It described the new look as simpler and clearer, an approachable world of images, colours and shapes, and tied it to a strategy set at the end of 2020 around customers, and to a core purpose and values of courage, care and simplicity announced a year earlier. That is the classic sequence: strategy first, words second, logo last, which is also why the logo arrives looking modest.

That invisibility is the point, and a credit to it. Accessibility was the real brief, and a legible typeface does more for millions of customers than a new symbol would. The softer Pebble loses a little of the 2014 joy, but Telia did not need a revolution. It needed maintenance, done well.