Welcome to issue #10 of The Dinamo Update! In this monthly newsletter, we’ll be continuing to share the latest ongoings at the studio in a few parts.

Was this forwarded to you? Sign up now!

Dinamo x GQ Korea

We’ve been exchanging messages and pre-release font files with Kiyeol for a number of years now, and we’re always excited to see how the art director combines a Hangul core with surprising Latin counterparts. It was amazing to finally have dinner with him in Seoul when we visited the city for the launch of our first Hangul release, Favorit Hangul, in Oct 2019. It’s actually in the pages of GQ Korea that we first got to enjoy not only seeing Favorit Hangul, but also our own Camera, Maxi, and Favorit <3

Next up & look back

While our next Hangul typeface Whyte Hangul & Whyte Inktrap Hangul—also designed by Mingoo Yoon—is already in the making, we decided to send Kiyeol some questions about Hangul type design as well as his vision for GQ Korea more broadly.

Read the full interview on our website—and a short excerpt below. Translation by the wonderful Young-Rong Choo, with special thanks to Aram Lee! ✨

GQ Korea’s 20th anniversary issue recently arrived in our letterbox. It has such character, and it’s exciting to see ABC Camera explored throughout! Why did you choose Camera for this issue?

Our anniversary trilogy of covers featured paintings by three artists, rather than our existing tradition of featuring models or celebrities on the front. I thought that the light trap holes of Camera would match nicely with this art project. It came together into something that many people have enjoyed. Among the spreads, there are also pages designed with the motif of a circle that emerged from Camera’s own holes. Then, I decided that it was not appropriate to put a cover line on covers featuring drawings by artists, so I came up with the idea that the readers themselves could decorate the cover with headlines if they wanted to. That’s where the alphabet stickers come in.

You’ve also been one of our very first Favorit Hangul testers and feedbackers. How’s that going?

A lot of time-consuming challenges have basically been solved by using Favorit Hangul. Before, we were typesetting body copy by mixing Hangul and Latin typefaces together. There were some issues with this: For instance, when using Korean and Latin typefaces, you have to make lots of detailed adjustments in the weights and sizes so that they fit together. When I read the text after we'd adjusted two fonts like this, I often felt the subtle visual interruption. Plus it took a lot of time and effort to create an InDesign style list, and moving the document was slow due to the use of many greps.

With Favorit though, it’s now possible to set up harmonious and smooth copy in both Korea and Latin. And handling the document is far easier. Now, when we’re using Gothic typefaces for body copy, Favorit is always our first consideration.

Thank you to Kiyeol for this ongoing email exchange and for your special support of Dinamo over the last years!

To further mark Hangul Day—when 15th Century Korean monarch Sejong the Great first proclaimed the invention of Hangul—we asked our own team member and Favorit Hangul designer Mingoo Yoon about the nuances of bi-script design:

-> Read more about our GQ Korea collabs—in English AND Korean
-> Learn more about ABC Favorit’s international translations

NEW RELEASE: ABC SOCIAL

Meet the team:

Dinamo’s co-founder Fabian Harb himself first penned ABC Social as the custom display font for The Monthly, Australia’s left leaning independent periodical covering politics, society, and culture. Over many years and many time zones, our super team has now extended it in all directions and for widespread release: Malte Bentzen worked on the very light styles, Fabiola Mejía on its monospaced family, Wei Huang on the regular and bold styles, Erkin Karamemet on Italics, with Rob Janes completing the mastering and production work.

The name “Social” nods to how the project first came about, and to how the designing process felt. If even more humans meet and connect through working with the font—be it spiritually, romantically, or platonically—we’d be more than happy.

-> Click here to view ABC Social yourself
-> And take a look at our custom font for The Monthly

We designed the TYPEFACE FOR ALICIA KEYS

In other studio news, we designed the custom typeface for the one and only Alicia Keys 😵 Massive thanks to the crew at Mouthwash Studio in LA, the masterminds behind the new identity and website, and to the Berlin and Amsterdam-based developers at antinomy. Also big appreciation to John Burgess for the typeface case study and animations 💜

Alicia, if you read this, please return my calls!!!

For the typeface itself, we threw a selection of heavily stylised star characters—like the A, R, the constructed numbers, sharp comma, and quotation marks—into an otherwise sturdy and laid-back typographic structure. Those different stylistic references achieve a lively and quite powerful rhythm when woven together, which feels like the right expression for such a multifaceted artist.

AK is an unmatched force in entertainment, entrepreneurship, and activism—it was truly special to work with her team on this digital archive >> www.aliciakeys.com <<

NEW IN EARLY ACCESS: CAMERA + CAMERA PLAIN

Finally, ABC Camera is available in Early Access—slide the lock to request the font and find out more!

ABC Camera existed as a one style, one weight (medium) font for a number of years, living an obscure but happy life holed up (lol) and waiting to be picked up, reconsidered, and extended. Dinamo member Sascha Bente took up the task after relocating to Berlin from Lausanne. After a couple of intense months, and with Rob Janes finalizing the mastering and production work, Camera is now a full, five weight family with and without holes.

-> Visit and get lost in Camera 🕳️

PROJECT UPDATES

Last month, we drew the new logo for the no. 1 German magazine for students: Our redesign for the 15-year-old Zeit Campus sees the newspaper’s classic masthead paired with ABC Repro, a forthcoming release by the beloved Erkin Karamemet. We rarely produce graphic design anymore, but it was very nice indeed to work on six single letters. Shout out to the team at Zeit: Jan Lichte, Lea Pürling, Frauke Schnoor, and Martina Kix. 🦐🦞🦀

STUDIO UPDATES

Rob and Renan are busy developing the UI for our Proof Generator, a Glyphs plugin that allows for on-the-fly proof sheet generation. Various presets will assist with proofing drawing quality, kerning, and spacing (you’re welcome).

• Erkin is currently picking up speed on the typeface we’re developing together with Stefan Marx—intense sketching sessions followed by manifold type technology experiments in the studio.
• Elias Hanzer is working on Diatype Heavy, Black, and Ultra. We’re almost done and the new font files will be added to our retail library soon.
• ABC Gaisyr—our beautiful text typeface with house-style Butterfly serifs—has been completed and will be available to request in Early Access soon.
• Tina Lehmkuhl is still welcoming your font-in-use submissions, and our editor Madeleine Morley is contemplating how to commemorate 12 issues of The Dinamo Update. Should we turn our digital ramblings into a printed book?
• We’ve welcomed Ethan Cohen to our family, a type designer from NYC living in Berlin. In his previous career, he was doing contracts and intellectual property things at a record label—now, Ethan will be supporting us with our own legal stuffs. As part of our mission to simplify font licensing to the max, Ethan rewrote our EULA, cutting it down from 12 pages to 4 🤯 and making everyone’s life far easier. It’s a work of art. Ethan also collects toothpaste.

Team AUTUMN Dinner 2021

We had a really beautiful Italian dinner in Berlin with our whole team last week, as Fabian was in town from Basel. We remember the early years when Dinamo consisted of just two. It was so boring! Fast forward to 2021, and we feel greatly humbled to see a dozen people sitting around a table enjoying one another’s company, new and old faces alike 💖 Renan, Immo, and Rea were dearly missed!

WEBSITE UPDATE: LIBRARY BROWSING

Our retail library has branched out since our launch last year, and so to better represent all of our current offerings, we’ve created a two column layout for comparing and exploring. The switch view option now collapses the bubbles—or you can toggle all the filter menu to see a range of necessary styles. These filters also remind us of where we need to grow—keep your eyes open for future serifs.

ABC SYNT HONDA CBR 600 F PC25

In Basel, Dinamo brother-in-law Kaj Lehmann showcased his special spatial installation at the Swiss Design Awards, featuring an actual Honda supersport motorbike that modulates ABC Synt’s various Italic angles on a screen.

Drawing from contemporary music, Synt itself is a radical embrace of rhythm in typography, with the vertical stems of letters sitting at predefined positions. Kaj is currently extending the font and adding a Monospace version, which follows Synt’s character unit-system. Also, he’s planning on adding a Medium and Bold weight in the future.

-> Slide the lock in our Early Access area for more on Synt 🔓

P.S.

• ABC Oracle was used by Zak Group in London for the identity of this year’s edition of Berlin electronic music festival Atonal: Metabolic Rift. And for more music font-in-use: Berlin’s finest live radio broadcaster HÖR is brought to you with ABC Monument Grotesk—a pleasant surprise when scanning its upcoming line-up (which includes some real bangers!!)
• Our friends Sarah and Hugo launched issue two of their magazine about making, Present, in our project space in Berlin. We send them many happy wishes. Order your copy over at present.xxx, it contains a stunning bunch of contributors and the best energy.
• We just backed the Kickstarter supporting the reopening of the London Center for Book Arts, which is asking for help to repair, rebuild, and reopen the studio after Covid-19. Everyone who loves books and is able to support should also considering backing!
• We love the super sweet Feliciano Type newsletter—especially this last issue, a very personal timeline celebrating twenty years in the type business. Many happy returns to Mário and the FT milestone!
• CA magazin from Korea dedicated our work-in-progress Whyte Hangul and Whyte Hangul Inktrap to a couple of very nice spreads—and they also conducted a small interview with us. Designed by Natalie Andruszkiewicz and Hyunho Choi. You can order your copy via @ca.books.
• The great WELTFORMAT GRAPHIC DESIGN FESTIVAL opens this Saturday in Lucerne and runs for one week: 9 – 17.10.2021. Don’t miss it! Music by graphic designers for graphic designers sounds like a potentially terrible idea, but let’s hit the aftershow party and find out ;-)

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 🦌