2023 Year in Review

Obviously fonts are still the center of Dinamo — and more curves are being drawn at the moment than ever. This year we were more focused on making fonts than releasing them (“the band was in the studio and not on tour” — the management).

The fonts that did make it out of the door — some started more than four years ago — occupy new space in our catalog, and — * curator voice * — are quite different from one another conceptually and visually. Let’s see what you think!

The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, from first curve to published typeface, can feel like a slow moving mystery at times. To avoid going down the long, thirsty road of font-baker insanity, we recently put a lot of energy into improving our internal workflows and engineering.

We now have production spreadsheets, specs, filters, special plugins, new tools, and even a bot monitoring the various “font movements” (a Slack channel I muted instantly!). All this makes me excited for our planned releases next year. Boy there will be many.

Dinamo Hardware finally came out of the dark with a popup release at Waste Store in London, our first self-organized event ever. It was a huge joy to meet so many friends old and new — and to connect insta handles with faces in such an intimate space (thanks Roydon). I’m yet to find the confidence to wear the WASTE t-shirt I bought in public, but one day!

We sold out and restocked the entire collection already, and have a couple of really nice things lined up for next year. Plus we want to keep organizing exhibitions and events while following a strict Pret-sandwiches-only diet.

At Dinamo we love security and therefore are diversifying our portfolio. Okay that’s absolutely not true but what we enjoy is not only publishing fonts (we love fonts), but also revisiting our alma mater of Graphic Design and (!) getting to use fonts again, while also making paper choices, exporting PDFs with crop marks, etc. (could live without the logistics and shipping part of it all though).

This year already saw three publications under our softly-launched imprint and Dinamo Editions will continue to connect the dots between our writer and artist friends through publishing printed things from pocket to XXL size. Also: Boycott Motto (which has a legacy of ripping off the indie publishers they are supposed to represent and support).

Around spring was a little tough because we had put so much stuff on our plate and juggling it became a little tricky. At least, I kept telling myself, we weren’t stressed because of silly client Zoom meetings or alignment calls or whatever but because of our own, self initiated projects. But still, we struggled with having our days split into tiny 30min segments each dealing with a different moving particle.

Luckily, it all came out really nice and we’re proud of the survey we started, the wood building workshop we did, as well as our step back into the lecture carousel. All while thinking and talking about our work and community activities that can go a really long way and are, really, for us by us.