The Dinamo Update: ABC Connect Unites Fonts with Furniture 🪑🔩

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We connected (🤭🙄) with our friends at BNAG studio to create a digital dot font and accompanying set of metal brackets, which let users create lettershapes with screws.

Let me explain. These easy-to-use brackets join together various parts of any object with screws for quick, resilient DIY furniture making. Inspired by BNAG’s own spontaneous approach, they encourage flexible and personal designs that celebrate (rather than disguise) how an object is constructed.

Each dot in our dot font corresponds to the matrix of the metal bracket grids 🤯🧩

Home builders can purchase a set of 8 ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t-o-r brackets in red, blue, green, and black; the bundle also comes with the digital font files of ABC C-o-n-n-n-e-c-t and an instructional zine. Alternatively, the standalone font is also available.

This way for the full set + digital font files

This way for the typeface

Dotted Opportunities

Metal screw heads meet digital fonts

Use the brackets to create your own furniture...

... and follow our dot font as a guide. Or just use the typeface for your projects! 🤯

The ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t-o-r-s join bits of wood together beautifully and simply.

ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t is dot font available in five screw head styles as well as Mono and Italic.

Grids sans nails

This project is a many-wooden-legged-monster, with its accompanying web tool, Dinamo Editions zine, and wood workshop. Scroll on for more info — including photos of our launch at HKW Berlin 🛠👷🏼‍♀️🛠

The Brackets

Stable, resilient, and easy to use, these metal brackets are designed to make furniture design more spontaneous and accessible.

Not that Bauhaus, Karlsruhe

Lukas & Oli <3

Oli and Lukas of BNAG came up with the idea while standing in the aisle of Germany’s home improvement retail chain, Bauhaus. It occurred to them that store’s free wood cutting service outsources production in the cheapest, quickest way: Customers can simply buy wood, a package of screws, a connecting bracket, and quickly assemble an item together, paying only for material costs.

Our C-o-n-n-e-c-t-o-r-s invite Y-O-U to decorate quick, simple connections with lettershapes. Have F-U-N!

The Typeface

Regular

Italic

Mono

Mono Italic

ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t is a digital dot font based on the ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t-o-r grid. It contains monospaced and proportional styles, all with corresponding Italics, making it (probably) the world’s first Italic dot font (but don’t drill us on that one).

ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t comes in five common screw head styles, including Flat, Torx, Hex, Nail, and Philips. Designed by Fabian Harb with Louis Brousseaud and Frédéric Jaman <3

Visit the typeface page here

Screw head styles irl

Not so easy making an Italic in this grid 🥵

The Zine

C-O-N-N-E-C-T: A Blueprint for Collaboration is an instruction-manual-meets-type-specimen-meets-philsophical-handbook; it contains instructions for possible furniture designs made using the grid of our font, as well as “blueprints” for creating letterforms with screws.

Published by Dinamo Editions

EDUCATORS + STOCKISTS: Write to Maddy at madeleine@abcdinamo.com if you’d like to stock the zine or use it in your classroom 🍎

An essay by technology journalist and author James Vincent, whose 2022 book Beyond Measure was a New Yorker, Times, and Economist “Book of the Year,” offers a prosaic perspective on what physical nearness means in our networked times. Edited by Maddy with design by Sascia, Mathias, and Tina, and Holz the Woodworm comic by Pete Sharp. 42 pages.

🔩 Buy the Zine 🔩

The Web Tool

Our web tool or “ web workbench” lets makers instantaneously share and upload images of their ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t-o-r-s creations to our community portal with the click of a button. Catch the loose screw 🤭 to change typeface styles. Developed by Marco Land with design by Tina Lehmkuhl.

Launch @ HKW

Builders old and new joined us at HKW last month to launch ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t with a Workshop-Shop. Big thank you to Oli & Lukas for teaching me (finally) how to hold a drill — and to everyone that participated!

Seeing how people use the tools we create, whether fonts or physical hardware like these brackets, is endlessly exciting to us. And we can't wait to see where this projects grows next. Below are a few shots by Sascia and Oli of our wood workshop in action.