Welcome to issue #5 of The Dinamo Update! In our monthly newsletter, we’ll be continuing to share the latest ongoings at the studio in a few parts.

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🚨 Dinamo, Cargo, Exclusive Partnership, Fonts 🚨

We’re excited to announce that we’ve just united services with Cargo. Having been friends and admirers for quite some time and after memorably visiting the team in LA a year ago—looking at clay pottery and enjoying our first highway journey in a Tesla—it’s wholly exciting to finally be working together. The idea for a partnership has been almost three years in the making, and we agree with what Cargo says about it: It feels like ancient friends in modern bodies ♻♻♻.

From this moment on, all Cargo users have full access to a selection of our favorite (😉🙄) Dinamo fonts. The offering features three families of various sans genres and includes: Diatype, Diatype Mono, Diatype Semi-Mono, Favorit, Favorit Mono, Monument Grotesk, Monument Grotesk Mono, and Monument Grotesk Semi-Mono. We hope there will be something for everyone in this mix, from the technical and expressive ABC Favorit to the sturdy ABC Monument to the elegant and most recently released ABC Diatype.

NB: This is a partnership of the long haul variety and we’ll be lending our type voice to the platform in other ways too, so watch out for further news. Also, this is an exclusive partnership—these fonts will not be available on other any other site builder.

Now that the trio of families have been officially released, we’re excited to see how they’ll live outside of our garden and on communal grounds. 🌷

-> Find out more about the partnership on our news page.
-> Visit Cargo and build a website!

L.A. Confidential (Backstory)

The Partnership’s Identity

A project of this scale is also a good excuse to initiate collaborations with people whose designs we’ve been admiring from a distance, and so we invited three new voices on board to work on a mini-identity for the partnership.

Joining us from Berlin, multidisciplinary designer Tim Lindacher created the Cargo<>Dinamo<>Fonts coin to represent the new ecosystem. We’ve long admired Tim’s art direction for Berlin’s music label and community youth center Live From Earth, and, above all, his kind personality. Tim laid the foundation for everything you’ll see below, and he stayed on as supervising guide until the end.

The Coin RELOADED 🥇

Fun fact: The coin wasn’t our first idea. We didn’t nail the initial proposal we came up with together, but we thought we had, and crowned each other geniuses for a brief moment. The Cargo team saw straight through the proposal though and sent it direct-way to the trash. (It included a juggling Gandalf and a tree hung with letters).

After re-emerging from the rock under which we had hidden, a new idea for the ecosystem came about, one far more suited to the partnership's intention and energy. The coin was born! And with it a growing collection of remixes/coin-textualizations:

To get the ecosystem spinning, motion designer Lucas Hesse came on board from Hamburg. Lucas studied with a bunch of famous names in Seoul, Mainz, and Offenbach, and he now runs his own studio. He’s very pro, creates ideas that work fast, and has a beautiful email signature. For us, he came up with a range of storyboards, avoiding the usual type-animating tricks. They’ll come to life mostly on our social channels over the next weeks.

Next, 3D artist Julia Kobel joined the project from Mannheim and was given a very loose brief. We were hugely impressed with how the soon-to-be graduate conjured up lab-world environments—part seasonally fluctuating paradise, part digital hellscape of NFTs and tech bros—for our coin to live inside. Can’t wait to work with her again, and you should hire her too.

You can see more images from the identity on our news page.

More Type Stuff About Arizona

In other news, we’ve just released a few dedicated pages to ABC Arizona, the first ever sans to serif superfamily. Our latest Darkroom tutorial goes through Arizona’s design features and guides users in modulating its visual output on the web. You can also read more about the making of Arizona and its five looks—Sans, Flare, Mix, Text, and Serif—here. And of course, Arizona’s own page with testers, glyph overview, and bundles.

P.S.

Before we see you next time, look out for news on our upcoming Font Gauntlet update. The new version supports AUDIO: You’ll be able to make your VFs respond to sounds, either by individual axis or all at the same time! 🎶 Features will include: Audio mode, mouse mode, presentation view, waterfall view, and tab views. And variable font specific features include: Auto text sizing, general instances, and Copy CSS code. Developed by Rob Janes.

• We’ve supported the crowdfunding campaign of Typohacks, the first manual for gender-sensitive typography in the German language! For non-German readers out there, there’s currently an important conversation going on around gender neutral language in German speaking countries. This book guides users in the typographic use of the gender star, which makes it possible to refer to all genders in writing. Design is by author Hannah Witte with an appearance from ABC Monument Grotesk. 💫
• For bookmarking: Our team has been enjoying Toshi Omagari’s article on ink traps and their relatives. Toshi looks at the origins of light traps, similar concepts and shapes, and ends with contemporary traps including our own ABC Whyte.
• As yet another extension of our Dietiker chair project with Maximage and Haw-Lin, we’ve developed an AR/VR version of the chair together with Digitatio / Mohamed Chajid (@mchajid), from Rotterdam. It’ll launch next week. Virtual chairs for everybody!

Thank you for reading our latest issue of The Dinamo Update. You can browse all of the back issues in our archive.

Speak soon,
Team Dinamo 🐛