Hey everyone - with the launch of Phone (2a) Plus, it seemed like a good time to share details on the industrial design story of Phone (2a). I sat down with Chris, Associate Principal Industrial Designer, and had him share lots of juicy details - Enjoy!
R - Welcome Chris, thanks for taking the time - what was the starting point for designing Phone (2a)?
C - This device is our take on a lower-cost, affordable phone compared to what we had done in the past with Phone (1) and Phone (2). We can see that everything else in the market at Phone (2a)’s price segment is very samey. Everyone else has resorted to differentiating through different colours and finishes. But, in doing so, nothing really stands out.
C - With the design language we’ve already established at Nothing, we had a good feeling that we could make a big impact in this market. And, actually, when the London team started working on this phone, we already had a really amazing starting point because of the team at teenage engineering and others, right back in the early days of Nothing…
R - Really? So the design of (2a) has been in the works for several years?
C - When they were deciding on and creating the whole brand vision for Nothing, they were already starting to imagine what the first few products would look like. In the Nothing brand book, there are some very early concept renders for the first Nothing phone.
C - You can see that transparency was already a huge part of our design language, which is very anatomical in the way that it shows all of the functional elements of the products and how they work… Interestingly, we started working on Phone (2a) in early 2022, which was before Phone (1) had even been launched!
R - Wow, OK, so it all started with a concept render. I see similarities here, but also a number of big differences…
C - We had to work really hard to decide which details we should or could keep visible, and which things needed to change. For example, as you can see in the concept render, the camera is very, very small, which is difficult to achieve in practice. The architecture and the materiality, whether it’s glass and metal or, in our case, all plastic, was considered too.
R - How do you approach that - translating a render into the (2a) we know today?
C - The process often starts with pen and paper, hand sketching and exploring lots of details very quickly. This render below is the design we had gotten to around June 2022. The team had to make the strategic decision to pause work on this project in order to prioritise Phone (2), due to the limited resources we had at that point.
R - These are super cool to see but still very different to the end result…when did you pick the project up again?
C - After the launch of Phone (2) in 2023, we got back to work on it. Since we had some time away from (2a), it felt like we had a bit more freedom to carry on thinking about this design in the back of our minds… in fact we had a bit of a breakthrough within that time, which was deciding on how we could achieve a really nice arrangement of the cameras in relation to the NFC coil. Here you can see some of our first thoughts about how we could position those two cameras.
R - It’s interesting to hear that stepping away from the project for a while helped you arrive at the final result… you can really start to see the now familiar silhouette in these sketches. Tell me about the decisions you made on the use of colour?
C - At launch, we wanted to keep things very simple, using our recognisable colours which are the white and the black. But also we bought an interesting twist on what we’ve done before with the Milky effect. And, following on from these launch colours, we also knew that we wanted to make our first move into some other colours as well…
C - When we look back through the early concept work, we can see there had been various explorations of colour, so we had a good starting point as to the different ways we could start applying colour that felt right for the Nothing brand. From a strategic point of view, we know that our goal is to stand out, and really contrast against what the other big brands are attempting.
R - As our first smartphone to depart from monochrome, this must have been a very careful consideration…
C - It’s a huge amount of work to optimise the way that colours are executed in order to make sure they look as good as they possibly can. It’s never as straightforward as you’d hope it will be. Blue and Special Edition were a joy to create and we hope everyone loves them!
R - I hope so too! Chris, it’s been a pleasure, thanks for sharing all of this - fascinating stuff!
C - Thanks Rob - it was fun to reflect on the journey we went on!
Plenty of new details there from Chris - I love hearing about this stuff!
Be sure to check out the new metallic Grey and updated Black of (2a) Plus on nothing.tech!
Thanks for reading along and be sure to drop a comment letting us know what your favourite aspects of the Phone (2a)’s design are… ⬇️
