New Cargo x Dinamo Fonts Partnership

We’re excited to announce today that we’ve just united services with Cargo. Having been friends and admirers for quite some time and after memorably visited the team in LA a year ago—talking all things clay pottery and enjoying our first highway journey in a Tesla—it’s wholly exciting to finally be working together. This idea has been nearly three years in the making, and we agree with what Cargo says about our collaboration: It feels like ancient friends in modern bodies ♻♻♻.

From this moment on, all Cargo users have full access to a selection of favorite (😉🙄) Dinamo fonts. The offering features three families of various sans genres and includes: Diatype, Diatype Mono, Diatype Semi-Mono, Favorit, Favorit Mono, Monument Grotesk, Monument Grotesk Mono, and Monument Grotesk Semi-Mono. We hope there will be something for everyone in this mix. To break it down, we’ve chosen three families for a variety of moods:

• ABC Favorit: Technical, expressive, artistic, subtly odd, humorous
• ABC Monument: Confident, Helvetica-like, sturdy, takes a backseat
• ABC Diatype: Smooth, elegant, warm, soft, friendly

NB: This is a partnership of the long haul variety and we’ll be lending our type voice to the platform in other ways too, so watch this space for further collaborations born of our union. Also, this is an exclusive partnership—these fonts will not be available on other any other site builder.

Now that the trio of families have been officially released, we’re excited to see how they’ll live outside of our garden and on communal grounds. 🌷

A project of this scale is also a good excuse to initiate collaborations with people whose designs we’ve been admiring from a distance, and so we invited three new voices on board to work on a mini-identity for the partnership. We often find that the more individual minds join forces, the stronger the output.

Joining us from Berlin, art director Tim Lindacher designed the Cargo<>Dinamo<>Fonts Coin to represent the new ecosystem. We’ve long admired Tim’s art direction for Berlin’s music label and community youth center Live From Earth, and, above all, his kind personality. Tim laid the foundation for everything you’ll see below, and he stayed on as supervising guide until the end.

Fun fact: The coin wasn’t our first idea. We didn’t nail the initial proposal we came up with together, but we thought we had, and crowned each other geniuses for a brief moment. The Cargo team saw straight through the proposal though and sent it direct-way to the trash. (It included a juggling Gandalf and a tree hung with letters).

After remerging from the rock under which we had hidden, a new idea for the ecosystem came about, one far more suited to the partnership's intention and energy. The coin was born! And with it a growing collection of remixes/coin-textualizations:

To get the ecosystem spinning, motion designer Lucas Hesse came on board from Hamburg. Lucas studied with a bunch of famous names in Seoul, Mainz, and Offenbach, and he now runs his own studio. He’s very pro, creates ideas that work fast, and has a beautiful email signature. For us, he came up with a range of storyboards, avoiding the usual type-animating tricks.

Next, 3D artist Julia Kobel joined the project and was given a very loose brief. We were hugely impressed with how the recent graduate conjured up lab-world environments—part seasonally fluctuating paradise, part digital hellscape of NTFs and tech bros—for our Cargo<>Dinamo<>Fonts Coin to live inside. Can’t wait to work with her again, and you should hire her too.

For the identity's sound design, Tim also got Mathis Ruffing on board, who contributed a soundscape for each of the three coins: bronze, silver, and gold.

Many thanks to the whole team for helping us dream up this universe! 🌎 And Folkert & Matthew for welcoming us into their Cargo world.

Credits

Creative Direction: Dinamo + Tim Lindacher
Graphic Design: Tim Lindacher
Animation: Lucas Hesse
3D: Julia Kobel
Sound: Mathis Ruffing
Text: Madeleine Morley