Rebranding: Nokia

Date: Fall 2020

Project Type: Rebranding

Note: This project is initiative

01 Introduction

Nokia was the best-selling mobile phone brand in 1998, and it became the largest smartphone company in the 2000s. However, Nokia is not even in the top 10 smartphone companies in 2020, competing with other smartphone companies. Therefore, I’m going to re-design the brand and bring them back to one of the major smartphone companies in a couple of years.

02 What is the brand?

Nokia is a technology company that provides phones, home wifi, smart TV, streaming device, and audio. They also have services such as 5G, clouds, software technologies, technical support services, and network improvement assistants. Interestingly, they offer both touch and keypad phones.

03 Target Audience

Even though they have many different products or services, their main products are mobile phones. Nokia has classic phones with keypads and minimized functionality and Android phones with 5G at a low price. For these reasons, they target an old generation or users who want to have cheap and simplified phones.

04 The Tone of Brand

As I see from their prominent tagline “connecting people,” Nokia highlights their technology that connects people and their impacts on bringing to customer’s life. They provide smartphones at a low price but still have advanced technology, which will be cost-effective. Their classic phones have keypads with minimized essential functionality such as 36GB storage and 4G internet speed, which provides high usability.

05 How is the brand currently portraying itself?

Nokia is human-centered, that its prominent tagline is connecting people. This value is demonstrated in their web pages, such as websites and social media. They have a photograph of customers on their main web page and employees from all different departments on social media. They present how people interact with their products and services and how employees work for them.

06 Logo

Started with pencil sketches for a brand logo to explore letterform, pictorial, and abstract logotypes.

07 Digitization

Developed from the sketches, I came up with four digital sketches focused on its negative and positive figures experimenting with letterforms and abstract logotypes.

08 Logo Development

Chose one of the drafts, I developed a letterform logo. It was intended to have people holding hands in the letter N, which reflected their tagline "connecting with people."

09 Full Mark: Challenge & Outcome

The draft was commented words “no“ popped up from the wordmark, which reflected a negative tone of voice. Therefore, I went back to the sketch and selected the other draft to develop based on a sketch review and critique feedback.

10 Outcomes

Eventually, I came up with the logo below. The reviewers agreed that it was the most memorable and symbolic graphic for Nokia to represent its speed, technology, and user-friendly.

Re-branding was challenging to bring a new visual system and represent the brand identities to the audience. It was a 3-month project to research the brand, target audience, and competitors to transfer its voice and visual language. I came up with its logo, brand colors and typeface, and other physical deliverables.