Our Annual Company Report

Those lines up there show how our fonts are used across different types of media. Generally, print and web are what most people buy, but video, social, app, and logo are growing. Curious to see if they play a larger role in 2023!

Do people purchase one, two, three, or more licenses at once? I learned something from this donut stack. Seems like designers are using out fonts for everything from a 25 copy printed zine to a multi-screen, multi-platform branding project.

Rea, whispering: “Despite the current economic circumstances, the growth in Dinamo sales is steadily going upwards.” 😬 Thank you to the designers out there who keep using our fonts! She also noted that ongoing pressure on the global economy could explain the sales dip in this year’s Q3/Q4.

We want our typefaces to speak as many languages as possible. Up there you can see what non-latin versions of Favorit were used the last years. I know all our typefaces will expand into new scripts, but Cyrillic extra-fast thanks to our in-house specialist Olga. She already completed Gravity Cyrillic.

We launched The Dinamo Font Customizer™, letting you customize our fonts as you purchase them — for free.

Before checkout, our Customizer lets you choose the alternate characters you’d like to make your font’s default. You can always log back into your user area to recustomize them (even fonts you bought back in the day). Since launching the tool, I learned the most popular alternates are single story a and Repro’s beautiful Space Odyssey S.

We reworked our typeface overview as well! Take a look. Fonts are now easier to browse and compare. Thank you Raffael for the extra wide columns. (Quote: “I won’t stop until these columns are as wide as html-humanly possible!”) <3

Another thing. After expanding our trial fonts to include all available glyphs and accented characters, downloads have continued to go up. No surprise here. It’s simply more fun being able to test fonts without a single character missing. Try them out.

Since switching from a usage-based licensing model to a size-based one in 2020, small and medium sized companies have become a larger customer base for us. It’s because the licensing terms are fairer on them. Last year, we added a couple more tier options to help differentiate company size even more. It’s already having an impact, said Rea.

Rea told me: “Updates to the website have helped raise online sales.” This means our customers are increasingly buying through our web portal instead of emailing us. That lets us concentrate on what we do best. Making memes.

We had our first customers in Afghanistan, Andorra, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Georgia, Lebanon, Moldova, Pakistan, Timor-Leste, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela last year. Also: Our Dinamo Update readership grew by 339%. 🚌 Twice, we’ve reached out to our community to conduct special surveys.

Obviously, we all know that design is best learned outside of school, and you shouldn’t believe anything a teacher ever says. All that said, it’s important to us that students can access our fonts easily. So we spoke with 70 students around the globe to hear what they had to say about buying and using fonts in design school today.

Following our conversation and in a (fleeting) moment of wanting to do the right thing, we decided to reduce the cost of our Student Font Packs to €55 (previously €123). Read the full report here.

Rea mentioned that our cost reduction made an impact: “Interest in the Student Font Packs is going up”. In fact, we’ll release a third Student Font Pack packed with new fonts soon — many of you’ve been emailing asking for it.

I spent a lot of time last year wondering about the life cycles of our typefaces. And what it means for foundries to be bought up by giants — because that‘s what we’ve seen happening a lot this past year. For a special issue of the Dinamo Update, I spoke with 15 friend-competitors at foundries big and small, to hear how they’ve been thinking about their legacy and the future of the products they’ve released into the world. Scroll through our rainbow waterfall yourself.