Welcome to the latest issue of our newsletter, where I’ll continue to share the latest ongoings at the studio. Take a look at our our archive.

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To give you more insight into how they work, Maddy and Johannes visited Sascia and Mathias in their studio next to Kottbusser Tor in Berlin to reflect a little on recent poster designs. Scroll on for an excerpt of their conversation. Or read the whole thing on our site:

Maddy: What’s interesting is that each Dinamo typeface campaign is so visually different. We don’t have this one aesthetic running through all of them. Why is that?

Sascia: That actually happened by accident. We started with the Marist campaign, where we went down this route of creating an imaginary archive in the style of The Da Vinci Code or Indiana Jones. And then the next campaign was Walter, where we made all these New Yorker-style cartoons. Both approaches were so vastly different, and that immediately put out the fire of us coming up with one visual language for all typeface campaigns.

Johannes: It’s about creating a world around a font. Which can be silly or unrealistic. With the Repro campaign, the poster feels like this crazy photograph of some strange, secret laboratory. You start to imagine a story when you look at it. Is this a hidden area where this font was built, with a mad scientist walking around? We’re trying to create the seed of a narrative.

Maddy: Some people might say that we should just showcase the font, because we don’t want to be too prescriptive about how the font should be used. Why do you not lean into that? Why create these type fictions instead?

Johannes: It’s just more fun. And it’s more interesting to talk about fonts like they’re people, or as if they’ve emerged from these weird universes.

Sascia: Also, it would reduce and take away a lot of the context around making a font if we just showed them in a blank way. Designing a font takes a lot of time. There’s a person behind a typeface. And there’s a personality behind the font. So why should it just be A-Z in green, blue, or yellow?

Maddy: One of my personal favorite ways you brought out the context of a font is the Walter campaign. Because it adds this second layer of understanding to the whole thing. There are two Walter type families, one is old and one is more contemporary, so you’ve made two mascots, an old Walter and a young one. How did those characters come about?

Johannes: Omnigroup, who we co-designed the font with, would send around pictures of the source Walter was inspired by out in the wild in Switzerland. It became like a Where’s Walter? joke. A meme. So I said to Sascia and Mathias, let’s do a quick campaign based on this Where’s Walter joke. And then it became this huge, beautiful thing.

Maddy: But Mathi and Sascia are not illustrators. So who drew them?

Mathias: We both did!

Sascia: Mathi was better at doing the faces. So we split them.

Mathias: Often you’ll find the same face on different bodies. That’s why they look eerily similar.

Sascia: You can tell who did a body by looking at the legs. I made them wear pants. And Mathi’s are wearing leggings.

Maddy: Is that usually how you work? By tossing a design back and forth?

Mathias: The idea is that we approach every project with an open outcome. So we allow it to become something we don’t know yet. We try to allow ourselves to be influenced by the content.

Sascia: We try to make use of the fact that we have two different brains. We have a lot in common but want to be very mindful of trusting each other when we diverge. Maybe one of us has an idea first, but we need to visualize it as it’s hard to explain in words. As soon as there is something there, we get into a conversation together. Exchange thoughts. And then switch it around. When one of us doesn’t know where to go anymore, we’ll hand the file over to the other.

Maddy: Let’s talk about Oracle. That campaign felt very research heavy.

Johannes: It began with me talking to Sascia and describing the world of the font. A place that felt almost like a temple.

Sascia: And I started diving into all these alternative music notation references, which I’ve always found very interesting but not yet gotten around to applying anywhere.

Maddy: How do you know about them?

Sascia: I wouldn’t say I have an exceptionally great memory. People tell me that I know a little bit about a lot of things. Sometimes if I see something, it reminds me of what I already know but forgot about. I remember things through a prompt. So Johannes asked me: “What if aliens had the ten commandments?” And then all these references in my memory came back to me. For Oracle, I started looking at experiments in movement, astrology, and notation styles.

Mathias: Oracle is called Oracle in reference to the Oracle of Delphi in Ancient Greek mythology, who breathed in fumes to make her predictions. So that’s also where the campaign video’s smokiness came from. We also wondered: Could Oracle be an alien, too? And so we made it into this creature. That’s where the mascot came from, which you see in the poster.

Sascia: So we reference the Ancient Greek aspect in a metaphor. But then we also show the technical aspect of how the font is drawn using the mascot, specifically the subfamily Oracle Triple, which has a bounding box that’s been segmented into units of thirds. Our mascot, she stands in three positions, taking up three units of space like the typeface. And she also moves from upright to italic, like the font.

Maddy: You’ve been creating these campaigns for us and working as our ADs now for exactly a year. How do you reflect on the last year?

Mathias: One of the first campaigns we did together was the mural in Paramaribo, and that feels like a long time ago. But it was just last year, produced in a completely different continent. That’s what feels exciting – you’re open to ideas like that mural.

Over the last year, we’ve become really aware of how long fonts take to be designed and drawn. We want to give that effort a lot of space and attention. We’ve also learned each font is always a different story, deserving of a different outcome, and there’s a beauty in that.

Walter Caption Contest

In each issue of The Dinamo Update, we provide a new Walter cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, can submit your caption by responding to this email or by commenting on our caption contest IG post. The best three responses win the complete Walter Alte. Scroll on for the last round’s winners — as well as the new contest.

THIS MONTH’S Contest

ROUND 2 Finalists

🏆🏆🏆

Congratulations to Alex Synge, Stanisław Zieliński, and Nathan Lew. All three of you should have received your files of ABC Alte Walter.

Fonts in Use

P.S.

Tina shared some customer emails with us in our recent communication team meeting 💕 We take customer support very seriously and it’s nice to see how many conversations emerge from your queries. Keep writing to Tina! We love hearing what you think.

• Johannes finally revealed his favorite typeface in this interview for Forward Festival. He’ll be speaking at the conference in August.
• “If you don’t understand the economics of what’s happening, you’re fucked,” says journalist Kara Swisher in this Vanity Fair interview.
• The class politics of Instagram face.
• Sascia and Mathi are part of a group show at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau called The Art of the Palliative Turn, which deals with the artistic potentials of death, palliation, and leave-taking. Their design for an accompanying magazine, The Palliative Turn No. 1, launches at ChertLüdde Books this week.
• Here’s one way to lose two hours: Where did the Roblox Oof sound come from?
• ICYMI: Maddy wrote a story about a global network tuning into the world’s vibrations for The New York Times.
• NYC TikTok diary 28 dates in 28 days chronicles love in the time of inflation. I watched every episode.
• What happens when procrastination becomes not just an individual habit but also a collective one? In her new book, Saving Time, Jenny Odell explores Americans’ relationship with the clock.
• A new issue of London-based Scenic Views just dropped — the interiors magazine focusing on the everyday, the overlooked, and the forgotten.

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

Love,
Dinamo