Welcome to issue #16 of The Dinamo Update. In this monthly newsletter, we’ll be continuing to share the latest ongoings at the studio in five or so parts.

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We believe that customizing fonts should not be an exclusive thing that people need to pay lots of money for. Everyone should have easy access to modifying their own font toolbox.

Over the years, we’ve received numerous emails from customers asking for small changes to their fonts. Mostly, designers fall in love with some of the alternates included in our designs, and they reach out to us because they’d like to make them their new font’s default. In response to this regular inquiry, the Dinamo Font Customizer™ makes font customization free, quick, and easy for everyone who purchases our typefaces.

Select → Customize → Buy

After choosing your typeface, and right before completing the checkout process, you can launch the Customizer and select which alternate characters you’d like to make your new font’s default.

Say you’re buying Diatype and would like the double story “a” as your default rather than the single story “a”: You can now simply select that option before checkout and our website will generate personalized font files for you on the fly. We like to think of it as just as easy as customizing your own trainers on the web portals of personalizable trainer brands.

Tip: You don’t have to customize individual font styles one by one. You can also customize complete families, our Essential Packs, or bundles containing many font styles in one go!

Next, Add Your Own Font Name

One more thing! You can combine the Dinamo Font Customizer with our Custom Font Naming tool to create bespoke font files containing both your preferred alternates and personalized name. When you install the font, it’ll appear in your menu with your chosen name and chosen default characters in all design applications (even WORD 😳).

Think about it: You can customize a typeface with your client and even attach their name to it. This makes it dead simple for them to then distribute their custom font internally and make sure everybody in their company is using the right one. And it feels really great! Call it the Yassification of font file management.

Re-Customizing Your Fonts

Once you create and download your custom font file settings, you can always log in to your User Area on our website and re-customize them whenever you like, if you decide to change your default settings (and switch to, say, square punctuation instead of rounded). Think of Kanye, who releases an album and later goes back in, modifies, improves, and republishes it again.

Hold my espresso martini: You can even do this with fonts you purchase from us back in the day! Just log into your user area to breathe new life into them.

Alternate Characters

80% of our fonts have alternate characters—and we’ll be making more in the future. Below, we’ve highlighted a few options that you’ll now be able to choose between.

You can discover them in detail on a typeface’s page. It’s nice to see how much you can change the flavor just by swapping a selection of characters.

No Parents, No Rules!

We’re no longer casting fonts into expensive metal; software lets us make fonts with as many alternates as we like baked inside. For us, having this flexibility in mind feels like a modern way of working.

At Dinamo, we have lots of people involved in designing a single typeface, which means we tend to have many differing ideas for differing characters in the room. In the past, most got killed, and we’d publish only a small selection. Sad. Today, the Dinamo Font Customizer gives us a great excuse to leave all alternate darlings inside a font so that our customers have more to choose from. Now, everybody is happy! 😁

New beginnings!

In the past, if you wanted to customize one of our fonts in this way, you’d have had to get in touch with our team, describe your wish, and then we would have had to agree on a price for creating new font files for you. It’s fine, we even made good money from it! However, we believe that in our digital world, personalization should be easy and embedded straight into our web store, as a free service.

-> Head online and launch the Dinamo Font Customizer™ yourself

STUDIO UPDATES 🐩

These past weeks, a baby has been born, a puppy adopted, and a team member moved into our Berlin studio. Also, our tri-weekly meetings continue to be a success.

Fonts in Use 🚁

Dinamo member Tina keeps her eyes on how our fonts get used each month and adds it all to our continually growing, geometric waterfall.

She’s asked me to let you know that your submissions are always welcome and appreciated!! Just send over a picture and description of your project to tina@abcdinamo.com ✨ (maybe you’ll even get featured below). Here are Tina’s most recent picks:

P.S.

Johannes is in New York next week. On Wednesday June 22 at 6:30–8pm ET, on invitation by Index (thanks Elie!) and Jonathan Maghen, he’s giving a talk at the Other Means studio in Brooklyn (also streamed) titled All Fonts Are Bastards. Topics will include but are not limited to: How to build fonts, relationships, and rethink licensing models and ways of working together. A crash course in managing artist expectations, teams, and a growing typeface catalog will also be included. Also discussed: Our use and abuse of in-house design tools, workflows in general, and more or less successful attempts at staying on Slack’s free plan for as long as possible. Come join!

• Is the font design business profitable? Feeling enlightened by the answers in this Type Drawer thread.
• Save the Brno Biennial from cultural barbarism (“Zachovejte Bienále Brno!”). Please help and add your name to the petition!
• This looks nice: A new book featuring collected stories by W. A. Dwiggins, one of the great visual artists of the twentieth century.
• Another Kickstarter we just supported: Typologie’s new color chart features Swiss type foundries (including Dinamo). Created by Studio Recto Verso.
• We’ve been waiting for this! Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index is finally available via Inventory Press. Design by Laura Coombs, and including over 1,000 entries on radical techno-critical activism.
• Don’t miss Uncovering the History of Early Women Type Designers with Lauren Elle DeGaine, an online Letterform Lecture on June 21 at 3–4:30pm ET.

Thank you for checking in with our latest issue of The Dinamo Update. You can read all of the back issues in our archive.

Speak soon,
Team Dinamo 🐢