If you’re feeling nostalgic for Nokia, check out the devices that defined ’90s mobile phone design in a new online archive

The Finnish electronics company Nokia produced some of the most popular mobile phones of the 1990s and 2000s. It became of the world best-selling phone brand in 1998, and the round plastic devices became ubiquitous in Europe. While the fat phones would evolve from advanced tools to meme-ified relics in the years that followed, their design remains iconic.

‘Everyone remembers their first Nokia’ Mark Masonmember of Nokia’s design team in the 1990s, says the Observerby Alice Visser. “When you say the name, it brings back a memory.”

Soon, nostalgics will be able to peruse Nokia’s visual history online. The company donated thousands of Nokia documents, videos, process models and design concepts to Finland Aalto Universitywhich the Nokia design archive on January 15.

In the archive, viewers can view numerous Nokia models, such as the Nokia-3310released in 2000 and now known as the ‘brick’ for its durability, and that from 2003 Nokia 7600or the ‘mango’, accompanied by a designer Tej Chauhan‘s sketches. Phones from the colorful brand 5100 series – one of which is in the Smithsonian’s collections National Museum of American History– are depicted as a plastic rainbow from the late 1990s, resembling those of modern children toys.

The archive also contains designs for phones that were never made, such as a digital representation of a strange green and black egg-shaped device. If ArtnetVittoria Benzine writes: “It’s enough to make you long for an era when everything looked a little less boring.”

“Nokia was one of the first phone companies to really put an emphasis on design and difference, with everything from ultra-affordable phones to the latest high-end handsets,” said Jonathan Bell, technical editor at Wallpaper* magazine, says the Observer. “In the world before Apple, Google and even Samsung, they were above all other players.”

Nokia may be known as a brand of the youth, but the company’s history actually dates back to the late 19th centurythen an engineer Fredrik Idestam founded several pulp mills in Finland. One of them was on the banks of the Nokianvirta River and inspired the name for Idestam’s new paper company. Nokia started generating electricity in 1902 and merged with a rubber company and a cable company in 1967.

Nokia released bulkier cars and mobile phones before they had a portable mobile phonethe Mobira Stadmanin 1987. After Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was spotted using one, the roughly £1.75 phone was nicknamed “Gorba.” Over the next decade, Nokia released model after model, including the Nokia-8110 (also known as the “banana phone”) that was featured in The Matrix in 1999.

In the late 2000s, Nokia was struggle to stay afloat in the new smartphone market (Apple launched the iPhone in 2007). Microsoft bought most of Nokia’s mobile phone business in 2013 before selling it in 2016.

NOKIA RINGTONE [1994]

That was a former Nokia designer at the time Anna Valtonena strategic design researcher at Aalto University, has acquired Nokia’s 20,000-unit database. This is what university spokesperson Sarah Hudson says Artnetcalled a Microsoft Mobile employee with whom Valtonen had been in contact and said, “You know those archives you were interested in? I’m about to put the boxes out on the street near the dumpster.’

“A treasure trove of real-life objects, including the original ‘brick’ and ‘banana“Telephones and never-before-seen handcrafted prototypes ended up in the hands of researchers, along with digitally curated sketches, sensational market profiling, interviews, videos and presentations,” says Hudson.

It took a few years to catalog the 959 gigabytes of material for the Nokia Design Archive, and many uncatalogued files still remain, says Aalto researcher Michel Nader Sayun tells Artnet. Since the university acquired the material, several former Nokia designers have contributed their personal collections.

Valtonen, chief researcher of the archive, explains Design treeKat Barandy says the Nokia Design Archive is as much about the people who created Nokia products as it is about the products themselves. She says the material is an example of the importance of designing an organizational culture “where it’s OK to try things and enjoy the process.”

Mason worked for Nokia for 20 years and says those decades were “a fantastic time for creativity”. Observer. He adds that the company’s designers focused on everyday people and created products that remain iconic.

“I hope people get out their old handsets [of] the drawer – they would probably still work,” says Mason. “Cut me and I will bleed pure blue Nokia blood.”