Dinamo gets a revamp and releases two new font families, ABC Maxi and ABC Diatype

In a new and very exciting relaunch, Swiss type foundry Dinamo welcomes a new era of typographic verve in the form of a jam-packed new website. Amidst a multitude of new changes (including how it deals with licensing and a new section dedicated strictly to students with slashed prices) the type foundry, founded by Johannes Breyer and Fabian Harb, also launches two new typefaces, ABC Maxi and ABC Diatype.

The former, Johannes tells us, is a “heavily-engineered yet warm and witty type system of spaghetti movement and angular lines.” Its bendy curves are informed by the long history of the International Style, first arising on the design scene in the 1920s and growing in leaps and bounds particularly during 1950s Switzerland. Clean, readable and in signature Dinamo style, variable too, ABC Maxi is a bold, newly exaggerated typeface enhanced by VF technology. It's currently available in four subfamilies: Round, Round Mono, Sharp and Sharp Mono.

Secondly, ABC Diatype is a more discreet family to its aforementioned sibling. It started out as an “obsessive exploration of the Swiss Neo-grotesque genre” and has been in the works for many years already. Tried and tested by a bunch of friends over time, the typeface is now available for public release, marking the type foundry’s first “warm hearted grotesque,” offering a slightly friendlier alternative to its previous releases, Whyte Standard or Monument Grotesk for example. Filling a new spot in Dinamo’s extensive library, this typeface doesn’t seek too much attention. Subtle in its purpose and readability, Johannes notes how it’s ideal for text or screen usage and ultimately, harks back to the days of pre-digital typesetting machines.

Along with these two new typefaces, Dinamo 3.0 has a myriad of other new features. When purchasing a complete type foundry, the variable font is also thrown in at no additional cost. The new site also allows organisations to personalise their own typeface name, calculate a best price algorithm, use a unified size responsive type tester, and to top it off, use machine learned AI generated text samples trained on Meet the Kardashians and Ted Talks themed on philosophy and science. Fantastic.

Built from the ground up as a place to support the ever-expanding technology of variable fonts, Johannes continues, “We think this format is the most powerful and future-ready emerging type technology, which therefore needs to be pushed further and implemented properly.” While the tech-savvy variable font remains an after thought for several font retail websites, Dinamo’s revamp rethinks the old static structures of website building, fundamentally, highlighting the full extent of its possibilities at the forefront of the web design.

“The new website kind of developed from the language and tone that we established,” continues Johannes on Dinamo’s famously light hearted brand, “and is built on a super impressive, tailored to selling typefaces, e-commerce power horse.” Each page is highly flexible in terms of its design and organisation while the individual modules are built to interact with one another. And, if this process weren’t exciting enough for the Dinamo team, this new overhaul saw the designers collaborate with a number of artists to inject a sense of artistry to the new site.

Renderings, illustrations, AI machine learning, not to mention the editing and writing of the project meant Dinamo 3.0 consisted of 20 individual projects give or take. The studio wanted it to be a collaborative experience, an opportunity to commission people they admired, in turn, adding a little something to the vibrant type design community of which Dinamo is a leading figure. There are plenty more features in this seemingly all-encompassing new era for Dinamo, more than we could squeeze in here but, luckily for you type lovers out there, the website is a treasure trove of new facets ready to delve into. Ultimately, designed to make the process of buying, licensing and trialing out Dinamo’s font families as enjoyable as possible.