For ages, fanboys have pumped out concept renderings of different products and stamped a well-known corporate name on them to lend an air of legitimacy. The worst of these have been pure flights of fancy with no attention paid to "design DNA"—some of the more ridiculous faux-Apple-branded concepts come to mind—while the best have incorporated well-recognized design elements, using a certain angle here, the proper font there, to suspend disbelief.
Good or bad, these concepts have largely been ignored by the companies themselves. But now we're seeing something interesting, an actual Nokia-branded blog displaying the concepts prominently. It's only after carefully reading the descriptions (or recognizing images from earlier Engadget/Gizmodo posts) that readers discover the concepts were not done in-house, but were in fact culled from around the internet.
So what does this mean? Is this a move of desperation by market-share-losing Nokia? (You can't, and won't, see Apple doing this, for instance.) Another step towards crowdsourced design? A shrewd form of talent-spotting with an eye towards recruitment? At the very least, it will hopefully mean that talented young designers who previously had no shot at capturing these companies' attention are now able to do just that. Whether their bold, non-boardroom-inspired design strokes will trickle up into the actual product remains to be seen.
SOURCE Core77
