Welcome to issue #12 of The Dinamo Update, our birthday issue.

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In 2021, we worked on many things that we didn’t know anything about. Many thanks to all of you—for using our fonts, for enjoying our Hardware, for trusting our new licensing model, and for sending us feedback in various ways. It really helped.

To celebrate what we’ve achieved together—as well as the first birthday of The Dinamo Update (🎂)—we’ve collected our annual highlights and low moments alongside a few important numerical facts and the usual low-resolution images.☝️

We released five very different fonts in 2021—different in style and also involving far more people than in previous years.

• ABC Arizona: Our slim, all-genres-in-one happy meal went public in March, the first-ever sans to serif “Superfamily” that packages five looks—Serif, Text, Mix, Flare, and Sans—into one single font file. One thing is for sure: Arizona’s designer Elias Hanzer won’t touch such an extensive typeface project anytime soon. Actually, him and Lucas Liccini are currently working on a printed Arizona specimen.

Press cross-examined us about the typeface, and Arizona was selected by Wael Morcos as one of the best fonts of 2021 for Eye on Design.

• ABC Social: To fill a gap in our library, we released this friendly, smooth grotesque with Variable Font capabilities in October. A multi-people, multi-width mega collaboration made by many eyes and players, Social has a sense of humor, with its freely designed forms and happy, rounded shapes. A total of seven different designers worked on this typeface over a period of seven years.
• ABC Marfa: While stylistically born in the hot metal typesetting period, Marfa was designed in our high-speed era of no time to lose. We were lucky enough to get Seb McLauchlan from our London satellite on board in the years leading up to its completion. Seb will release two typefaces with us this year: Marist and ROM.
• ABC Asfalt: The elongated letters of Asfalt are based on road letters, which are stretched along highways to compensate for the low perspective of an approaching car. Released in March last year, Asfalt is entirely uppercase with just one sturdy weight.

ABC Gravity

We want to give special space today to ABC Gravity. Not only is it a typeface that went through the three stages of a release journey all in one year (where we: 1. Send a font to close friends → 2. Place it in Early Access → 3. Release it to the public), but it was also the first Dinamo font by our own Rob Janes. Rob joined us four years ago to help us with all things tech, and not only did he introduce us to the world of dark, harsh metal music but also the delight that is forgetting about time over a game of chess. We love you Rob.

Rob had long been working on Gravity and it developed into a—quite relaxed—multi-width variable monster. Its many stylistic alternates allow for playful settings and super-compact title arrangements, and special features let you arrange and modify the position of characters. Eye on Design gave it a nice review.

Cargo

We were hugely excited to unite services with Cargo last year. All the platform’s users now receive full access to three of our sans’, namely Diatype, Favorit, and Monument Grotesk. And big news for the new year: We’ll be adding Arizona and Gravity to our offering very soon!

Backstory: after three years of talking with and admiring Cargo from afar—followed by one memorable trip to LA featuring a Tesla and some clay pottery—it’s exciting to now see our typefaces appear across numerous personal websites throughout the digital cosmos. And not to forget the partnership’s identity, either—another good excuse for collaborations, this time with Tim Lindacher, Lucas Hesse, and Julia Kobel. Head this way to see the entire ecosystem—coin, tech bro hellscape, and all.

MOUTHWASH

Teaming up with the Los Angeles-based collective to reimagine the original Difficult Times t-shirt was like uniting with kindred spirits. Their crew is similar to ours in many ways, and it was nice to watch them build up over time and then even pass us from the right lane. Every time we Skyped, they seemed to have tripled in size.

Our black Difficult Times t-shirt with a folded, oversized label sold out within minutes. Plus, we interviewed MOUTHWASH here—as Alex, Ben, Abraham, and Mackenzie say, “it’s important to us to prioritize our own curiosity.” Sending suitcases of rose water across the Atlantic.

San Francisco Symphony

Collins commissioned us to create a bespoke font for the logo and identity of the San Francisco Symphony, which dropped in a whirlwind early last year. Our dynamic Variable Font responds to sound, moving up and down like the notes of a score, and our special font modulator also lets the company generate moving assets entirely in-house. The Brand Identity wrote all about it here.

Alicia Keys

We created the typeface for the one and only Alicia Keys—an unmatched force in entertainment, entrepreneurship, and activism. For her custom font, we placed a selection of heavily stylized star characters into an otherwise sturdy and laid-back typographic structure, creating a powerful rhythm fit for the multifaceted artist. Identity design by MOUTHWASH, web dev by Antinomy Studio.

RIMOWA

We spent many mornings looking at the curved corners of RIMOWA aluminium suitcases for the design of the iconic luggage brand’s custom typeface. Inspired by early 20th Century workhorse grotesques with warmth, our typeface fuses the industrial with the humanistic. Thanks to design studio Commission for bringing us in!

Type Production TOOLS

Instead of solving a continual problem each time it reoccurs, we tried to invest time into producing tools, or scripts, that help us forever. Toolmaking can be tedious and its rewards aren’t immediately apparent—but they become clear in the future.

The Font Gauntlet 2.0

In 2021, our Gauntlet got its biggest update yet. When we first developed our Gauntlet four years ago—a free testing tool for generating and animating Variable Fonts—it was impossible to take a quick look at the in-between moments of a VFs-in-progress.

This year’s massive update—masterminded by the skilled hands of Rob—was an important new chapter in the tool’s lifespan, as it became more of a mature, every day software companion. It’s been a joy to see the Gauntlet travel and become a toolbox staple for so many!

The Proof Generator

To simplify our font-proofing workflow, Renan and Rob developed an in-house tool that allows us to speedily generate on-the-fly pdf proofing sheets. We’ve long been tired of creating proofs by hand, it’s tedious manual work. We can now make a huge array of proofs—including the specimens users download from our website—with just a few quick clicks. We then share those sheets with the team for everybody to draw comments on (using iPads).

We’ll officially be inviting people to test the tool and send us feedback soon—send rob@abcdinamo.com an email if you’d like to take part!

Quick Scripts and Tiny Helpers

The Name Crawler

Knowing that a name is the most important part of a typeface, we released our Name Crawler to the public in January of last year. Developed with New York-based Taichi Aritomo! Our tool quickly generates names based on a user’s favorite choice of characters—and lets them save the best results. Many typefaces and other objects adopted new namesakes in 2021 because of our mystery crystal ball. 🔮🔤

We’re not so good at making logos but here are two that we managed to carve into digital stone:

3300 Dietiker Chair with Maximage

Last year began with the unveiling of our limited, special version of Bruno Rey's classic chair, the Dietiker Modell 3300. A frameless wooden seat, four cast aluminium connectors, straight plywood legs on all sides, and a simple curved wooden—plus four colors specially chosen by color alchemists Maximage. We’ve been sitting like the clown version of a Swiss knight ever since.

Dinamo TheraBand with Matter Of

We released our easy-to-use resistance band in May to celebrate the launch of ABC Gravity, giving those in need of analogue means a simple way to stretch our latest variable drop. It was designed and conceptualized by our new friends at Matter Of studio in Stuttgart. <3

MASCHINE Mk3 DINAMO with Native Instruments

We were very proud to launch the MASCHINE DINAMO with Native Instruments in June, a controller two years in the making that features ABC Whyte Inktrap across all its surfaces. It was a huge pleasure to work with hardware designer Johannes Schroth on this intricate piece of technology—sending him a thousand thank yous for dreaming it all up and inviting us in.

Hardware Stats

We offer a small selection of complete but unpublished typefaces, which people can request to “unlock” before their official release. Last year, we streamlined the UX of our requesting process so that it’s easier for customers to gain access to Early Access fonts—and we also released four new typefaces into the arena:

• ABC Synt: Designed by Kaj Lehmann and available for request in January, Synt is in the Scotch Roman style but with a parametric stem rhythm inspired by the sounds of a four-to-the-floor beat.
• ABC Estragon: In February we welcomed Estragon to the table, the “Schwitters-meets-Wildstyle” (quote by Sam de Groot) headline font with Free-form, Arrow, and Bubble styles that take their cues from an 1890 wood-letter specimen.
• ABC Helveesti: With the help of Andree Paat, we finished spike-proofing this tarantula in the early weeks of September, a font that reimagines light traps that once helped compensate for blurring during the phototypesetting era.
• ABC Camera: ABC Camera made its long-anticipated debut in Autumn, a reinterpretation of light traps used in the 60s and 70s to make text more readable on TV screens—and available both with and without the holes.

LECTURES

One of our highlight invitations this year came from the Strelka Institute in Moscow, which asked us to be visiting teachers and lecturers. The journey was hugely memorable, not least because we hadn’t traveled together for over 18 months.

And afterwards, it was nice to see a spike in interest in our work in Russia, as well as more Favorit Cyrillic sales.

Our team expanded threefold: Renan joined full time, Fabiola became our part time Mono expert (and much more), and Ethan came on board to guide us on the legal side of selling fonts. Our editor Madeleine gave form to our new, monthly installments of digital ramblings. We also finally wooed Erkin back, while Tina is sharing her expertise with us for three years already.

In many ways, we don’t do things too differently from our early years, but with a stronger, bigger team, the more professional we feel we’ve become. It’s a huge privilege to be on the receiving end of so many great ideas and minds, and we are humbled to be working with collaborators with specialized backgrounds who have taken Dinamo to heights we could never have imagined.

As many times as it didn’t happen, we’ve become especially fond of our newly established weekly team call. Covid didn’t allow us to take on interns this year, so we focused even more on strengthening our existing team so it can hopefully run together for many years to come. 🙏💞

Our Team’s Best + Worst 2021 Moments

Let’s see what they say…

Together with our data analyst Rea of all-star Nea-Kosma, we compiled a series of business insights for our sales-dedicated August newsletter. Now, we’ve updated our insights to cover the entire year.

Sales

In 2020, we adapted to a new, streamlined sales model based on value-based pricing—you can read all about it here. We’re glad it’s been working out so far for us—as we spoke about with Type01 in July and lately in an in-depth interview with Developments (amongst many other things).

Below, Rea has charted the development of our revenue from 2019 to 2021—illustrating how our sales have been impacted by our new licensing model, covid, and seasonal trends. You can see our sales per month (the spiking line), our exponential trend (the dotted line), and the change of sales relative to the previous observation period (the neon green bars).

Revenue

Global Community

We’re very happy that our community grew in 2021 and reached areas of this world that are outside of our main areas:

Typefaces

Our licensing model wasn’t the only thing that defined how we ran in 2021. It was also our first year we offered bundles, student discounts, and sales add-ons to our customers.

Below, you can see how our typefaces settle after hitting the market, and also how they age (we hope gracefully)!

New licensing model

Our biggest mission in 2021 was to live with, educate about, and, sometimes, defend our value-based pricing model, which strongly differs from the traditional use-based model of most foundries. In the graph below, we looked at what kind of licenses big and small studios were buying throughout the year—and how our model has made an impact.

Last year, we started featuring font in use stories on our website. We feel it’s an exciting way to express gratitude to the people who use our fonts. Studio Koto’s redesign of Discord based on Ginto has a particularly special place in our memory.

And we’ve got exciting news: Seb McLauchlan, together with Kasper Pyndt, is currently working on Ginto Condensed, Ginto Rounded, & Ginto Rounded Condensed. Watch out for them in 2022!

We’ve been carefully developing tools for a long time, but keeping them up to date is something we learned a lot about this last year. Sometimes you forget about the plants you planted a few years ago—but it’s important to keep giving them renewed attention.

Typeface Extensions

In 2021, it was the first time we found ourselves in the situation where our team was big enough that some members had extra availability—so we got to ask ourselves, what would be nice to extend? We’re also increasingly in mindset of completion, adding Italics to the fonts that don’t have them for example, all while producing new, incomplete work. So while we were busy planting young roots, in the background, the following families grew new branches:

Monospaced versions

widths & Italics

additional languages

As part of our goal to make Favorit a truly global font, we also released a number of language extensions to live alongside our Latin, Hangul, Cyrillic, and Greek families.

The minds and eyes of Khajag Apelian and Wael Morcos gave form to Favorit Arabic, which now supports Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu. Yanek Iontef and Daniel Grumer of Fontef Type Foundry developed Favorit Hebrew—featuring two versions that differ in character height. Bundled into one Variable Font with an heigh-axis, of course.

Website Updates

Since our redesign in 2020, improving our website has been an ongoing task. And we couldn’t do it without the consistency and brain power of our development team at Humans & Machines. It’s super rare to work directly with founders, on eye level—and that’s one of the many great things about them. 2021 was also a special year in our relationship because it marked the first time that Johannes met Rafael in real life while taking a pilgrimage to Cologne. <3

How do Early Access requests, newsletter subscribers and font trial downloads behave? Our data shows that improving particular website sections leads to our community using them more frequently:

Responding to people’s emails used to be 50% of what Fabian and Johannes spent their time doing. But they kind of (🥴) stopped this year and our beloved Tina took over. (You can still get F & J on the phone if you press the force-the-line button).

It’s been particularly hard to let go of customer support for us, because being in touch with our community is at the heart of Dinamo and something we’ve always prided ourselves on. But it’s been beautiful to see emails thanking Tina for her quick responses and for finding solutions to problems we hadn’t yet even noticed needed to be solved. We feel blessed to work with her and to watch how her ideas for better customer support transform into other team collaborations—like tutorials written by Tina and Rob.

… and IN 2022:

• More time offline and outside of Dinamo will be spent.
• Two more Dinamo branches will open, in Portugal and Spain.
• Our gallery in Berlin will re-open and host regular lectures, (non-design) exhibitions, and dinners.
• Our team will restructure, defining clear roles for the first time since our founding in 2014. Chief Marketing Assistant Officer in Training here I come.
• A mysterious typeface begun 7 years ago—and almost buried by two lawsuits—will surface.
• A month will be set aside to improve the website.
• A baby will be born.
• A dog will move countries.
• A new language will be learned.
• A book will be written.
• More fonts will be made.
• The first Dinamo Sabbatical will be taken.
• Slack will not be upgraded to Slack Pro.

Thank you for reading all the way. This was the anniversary issue of The Dinamo Update—you can take a look through last year’s editions here.

Talk soon,
Team Dinamo 🍊