Nokia shuffles design team to improve style
By Marc Perton 
posted Mar 2nd 2006 5:46PM
posted Mar 2nd 2006 5:46PM
What do you do if you're one of the world's top cellphone makers, but competitors keep eating your lunch
when it comes to creating stylish, must-have fashion phones? If you're Nokia, you ditch your design chief and bring in
some new blood. And, so, Nokia has bid a not-so-fond farewell to Frank Nuovo, once known as the Calvin Klein of
cellphones, who has managed the company's design team for 15 years. In place of the 45-year-old Nuovo will be Alastair
Curtis, who currently oversees design for Nokia's low-end handsets. We're not quite sure that's the right direction for
the company to take; it sounds a little like Calvin Klein is being replaced by the guy who makes the CK knockoffs for
Canal Street vendors. We hope we're wrong, but if Nokia's next phone looks more like the 1110 than the
N91, we'll know why.
It's about time. All of square, boring shaped phones with no tactile sense for dialing in the dark has sucked for a long time now...
Nokia compete well based on features, but not on style. Moto, SE and Samsung are introducing better looking phones these days.
If i'm not mistaken, I think Frank Nuovo is acutally going to be handling their Vertu line from now on (which is his specialty anyway). And Alastair Curtis on the other hand, he has been responsible for Nokia's business class phone design, such as the newer E series and possibly older 6xxx series like 6230i which in my opinon, isn't so bad at all.
hmmm... engadget and 2 have it slightly wrong. yes frank will continue lead design for vertu. alastair was the top design guy responsible for all of the mobile phones group - this is basically everything other then N series and E series products. i would not call the 8800 a low end phone. alastair has been with nokia for awhile, too. all in all, it will be good. now i understand how things here can get overly simplified for the sake of entertainment. but hey... i like to be entertained, so keep it coming.
I like a lot of Nokias designs, the N80, the N91, others. Simple and elegant. Good enough for me.
Frank Nuovo will go to Vertu and be the head designer over there as well as being a consultant to Nokia. Alastair Curtis was formerly the head of design over the enterprise lines, so he is responsible for the E-Series.
Frank Nuovo designed phones like Nokia 8810, Nokia 8850 and Nokia 8800, which was announced as the phone of the year at 3GSM last month.
Also, they are reorginasing their whole design process within Nokia.
I think this is a good step towards the future, especially in regards of the whole restructuring of the design department.
Also, I think engadget should have done some more research on this news, way too many facts wrong!
Alistair Curtis has worked for 15 years with Frank Nuovo, thus the change of design won't be so huge. In fact, I believe it will follow the current style with more slight and metallic features.
I guess this comes as no surprise. Seeing as how the N91 looks like crap, and Moto just hired Pininfarina to design phones. Nokia needs to step up to the plate with their phone designs. Moto's GUI sucks, and Nokia has one of the best... but if their phones look like shit, people might be willing to put-up with a crappy UI to have a nicer phone. Moto's latest slew of phones look very nice, and most of them these days are Quad-Band, while Nokia is still putting Tri-Band in their handsets. It's a shame, because I've always been a huge Nokia fan, my first bunch of cellphones were all Nokias. But right now, they don't have anything inspiring... except for the 8800, 7210, 7280, and a few others.
-- Elias
Hopefully, Nokia will be able to turn out highly designed phones much quicker. Usually a designer has a core team that they work with. Curtis will likely bring many of his team members from his current design unit with him.
I just hope that it's form follows function and not just form. But hey, it works well for Motorola, so maybe it should just be form.
also, magnus, should also do more research. alastair curtis was in the mobile phones group, not enterprise solutions. also, in general, none of these people actually designed any of the current phones themselves. these are leaders of the design organization. i don't think they've been doing much cad work, lately. i know the designer of the 8800, and he is in finland and not named frank. there are many designers, and of course even more engineers and product managers and software engineers, etc etc etc. no single person is responsible for any single product. frank does however draw and inspire the vertu products himself, i understand.