Studio
Dinamo is a type design agency offering retail and bespoke typefaces, design software, research, and consultancy. Based in Berlin, we operate via a network of satellite members across the globe, oscillating between commercial and cultural projects of varying scales. Members of Dinamo are visiting teachers at various art academies and have been invited to give workshops and lectures at a range of international institutions.
In 2017, Dinamo was awarded the Swiss Design Award by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture. In 2018, the foundry’s co-founders Johannes Breyer and Fabian Harb became members of the AGI.
People
Fabian Harb
Co-Founder
Fabian Harb is originally from the mountainous Appenzell Ausserrhoden in Switzerland, but currently lives in Basel, where he co-runs the studio. Ever since studying at the Basel School of Design and interning at Claudiabasel and Studio Laurenz Brunner, Fabian has had a love for archives, second-hand book stores, and looking at the past with fresh eyes to propel historical concerns into the present.
Johannes Breyer
Co-Founder
Johannes Breyer was born to a German father and Chilean mother. After studying at the University of the Arts in Zurich and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam—and a stint working at the design studio NORM—he moved to Berlin. After winning the “Most Beautiful Book in the World” prize, he retired from graphic design and co-founded Dinamo. Johannes is involved in the day-to-day oversight of the foundry, its many people and many sprawling tentacles.
Renan Rosatti
Type Design & Engineering
Renan Rosatti is a type designer from São Paulo, Brazil who crossed the Atlantic in 2019 to study at the TypeMedia master program in the Netherlands, after which he moved to Switzerland to join our Basel team. Renan continues to expand our library and works on custom typefaces, spending the rest of his hours experimenting with code and stretching at the realm of variable possibilities.
Madeleine Morley
Publishing & Communications
Madeleine Morley is a Berlin-based writer and editor originally from London. She studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge and Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and has written on culture and technology for The New York Times, Fast Company, Dazed & Confused, The Guardian, and more. She heads up our imprint, Dinamo Editions.
Vanessa Olt
Business
Vanessa Olt originally grew up in a small village in Hessen, Odenwald, and has lived in Berlin for over ten years. After studying International Business, she realized that many small studios and creatives are in need of someone to take care of finances, data, figures, and paperwork. In 2018, she joined Dinamo to help with these various domains. Venessa has recently taken her services to the next level by co-founding a financial consultancy for creatives with Rea Stamatoulakis called Nea Kosma.
Christina Lehmkuhl
Licensing & Custom Service
Christina Lehmkuhl is a Berlin-based freelance designer with a straight-forward-type-heavy-approach, which occasionally swerves into digital realms. She joined the Dinamo family in early 2019, when Johannes recruited her as the foundry’s Licensing Officer. This means chasing and taking care of all things licensing-related, and also managing our Font in Use area. She also helps with all customer support.
Rea Stamatoulakis
Business
Rea Stamatoulakis is an Offenbach-based data analyst, strategic advisor, and number cruncher with a German mom and Greek dad. She joined the team via Vanessa, being the second half of Nea Kosma. This joint company brings the pair together to act as mediators between the financial and creative worlds. Furthermore, Rea is currently studying International Economics and Cultural and Social Anthropology, researching topics like the role of consumption in the construction of social identities.
Hugo Jourdan
Type Engineering
Hugo Jourdan is a French type designer/engineer graduated from Type Design Master degree at École Estienne in 2020. He’s so hooked on coding that he practically dreams in Python. He’s crafted a string of tools, each more innovative than the last, to solve just about any problem. Now, he’s bringing his code wizardry to our team in Berlin
Erkin Karamemet
Type Design
Erkin Karamemet is a typographer and type designer from Berlin, whose practice revolves around developing trademark and custom typefaces for corporate identities, and consulting art directors and studios on all things typography-related. His collaboration with Dinamo has been a long-standing one: Erkin was a type designer on projects including Pareto, Favorit, Prophet, and Whyte, and his involvement continues to this day.
Fabiola Mejía
Type Design
Fabiola Mejía is an independent type designer from San José, Costa Rica. After graduating from the TypeMedia program in The Netherlands, she joined Fabian in the Basel studio to help with an expansion of the Monument Grotesk family. She’s now back in her hometown, collaborating remotely with Dinamo and working on her own type-related projects under the name SUPERCONTINENTE.
Olga Umpeleva
Type Design
Olga Umpeleva is a type designer from Moscow, Russia who graduated from the TypeMedia master program in the Netherlands in 2020. A lover of both Latin and Cyrillic shapes, she’s currently working on Cyrillic translations of many of our typefaces. Aside from Dinamo, Olga helps other studios with language extensions from time to time and works on her own designs, like the experimental Westenwind.
Ethan Cohen
Type Design & Head of Business
Ethan Cohen has a masters degree in TypeMedia from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and attended the Type@Cooper Extended Program. Before moving to Europe and eventually joining Dinamo, he spent many years handling contracts and IP at a record label during the day and playing guitar and banjo in bands at night.
Simon Merz
Hardware
Simon Merz is Vienna-based designer, originally from the beautiful suburbs of Ravensburg, Germany. His creative practice is based around ideas, concepts and nuances – many times referencing the several subcultures that he grew up in. Alongside with commissioned work for clients, his creative practice also includes artistic and research-based projects. In 2018 he founded WTP—PP, a Publishing Platform focusing on well thought-out objects, publications and clothing with a strong attention to details and the exploration of ideas and materials.
Shortnotice Studio
Art Direction
Sascia Reibel and Mathias Lempart of Shortnotice Studio joined the Dinamo team in 2022 to steer our art direction and Hardware. The Berlin-based duo offer graphic design solutions for short notice requests, and since their founding in 2019, fluidly move between online and offline spheres.
Artists & Family
Over the years, we’ve built long-standing relationships with like-minded type designers and artists, who contribute not only to the daily work-life of our studio but also publish their self-initiated fonts in our library.
Larissa Kasper & Rosario Florio
ABC Monument Grotesk
Kasper-Florio is a graphic design studio founded by Larissa Kasper and Rosario Florio and based in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Since 2013, the duo have worked on identity and editorial design projects for various institutions and publishers in the fields of art and architecture, and in 2015, Larissa and Rosario formed their own imprint, Jungle Books. Larissa first met Johannes while studying together in Zurich, and a few years later, Dinamo partnered with Kasper-Florio to release ABC Monument Grotesk.
Seb McLauchlan
ABC Ginto, ABC Rom,
ABC Marist
Seb McLauchlan is an independent designer, originally from New Zealand but based in London since 2015. He began working with Johannes and Fabian after introducing them to what was to become ABC Ginto, his first release with the foundry. Seb currently works as a graphic designer, with recent clients including the REAL Foundation, Kwaidan Editions, and Alexander McQueen. He’s also a lecturer and critic, and currently teaches at Kingston School of Art.
Felix Salut
ABC Galapagos
Felix Salut is an Amsterdam-based designer. He runs his own label and experimental design studio that bridges fields of design, fashion, and visual art. Felix shared a studio with Fabian in Amsterdam a while ago and asked Dinamo to embark on ABC Galapagos together. Felix is currently developing new items for his label, as well as a column on the relationship between typography and speed.
Alessio D’Ellena
ABC Laica
Alessio D’Ellena is a Rome-based type and graphic designer originally from the Italian city of Marino. He found a home for his typeface ABC Laica with Dinamo after a series of email exchanges with us: His type family received the Type Director Club’s Certificate of Typographic Excellence in 2017. Alessio is currently developing his research-based type practice SUPERNESS, where he continues to test the rules and tools of type.
Kaj Lehmann
ABC Synt
Kaj Lehmann is a graphic designer based in Zurich, Switzerland. He designs and co-publishes zweikommasieben magazine, and has extended its bespoke typeface, ABC Synt, for Dinamo. While continuing to concentrate on font-related work, Kaj also focuses on commercial and personal projects in the cultural fields.
Robert Janes
ABC Gravity, ABC Gramercy
Robert Janes is Berlin-based type designer and engineer from Melbourne, Australia. He joined the Dinamo team in Berlin in 2018 and had his hands on many projects and spheres, including creating typefaces, mastering releases, and developing new tools for in-house workflows. Robert released ABC Gravity with us in 2021.
Elias Hanzer
ABC Arizona
Elias Hanzer is a Berlin-based graphic and type designer originally from Vienna. He met Johannes during his graphic design studies and while exploring type design waters for the first time. Ever since, he’s been a long-time collaborator and friend of the Dinamo family, and he released the first ever sans to serif “superfamily”, ABC Arizona, with us in 2021. In 2022, we published his ABC Arizona Specimen. As well as his own type design practice, alongside Lucas Liccini, Elias co-runs the practice Hanzer Liccini.
Margot Lévêque
ABC Marya (upcoming)
Margot Lévêque is a French Graphic and Type Designer currently based in Paris. She specialized in Type Design, Branding, Web & Editorial Design. After gaining experiences in Paris and Amsterdam, she spent a few months working at Pentagram in New-York with Paula Scher. She’s currently an independent graphic designer working with clients like Hermès Paris, Vogue, and Maserati.
Giliane Cachin
ABC Untitled (upcoming)
Giliane Cachin is a graphic designer from the French part of Switzerland, who has worked at NORM and Lineto. She went to New York for an artistic residency after winning the Swiss Design Award, and first teamed-up with Dinamo to work on its printed specimen. Currently, Gilane is devoting her time to her own studio and teaching practices.
Andree Paat
Andree Paat is a type and graphic designer from Tallinn, Estonia. He first met Fabian and Johannes when he was a student and during a type design workshop, which sparked his first interest in fonts. Five years later, Andree worked on Dinamo typefaces ABC Maxi and ABC Oracle. At the moment, he juggles his time between graphic and type design, teaching, Dinamo, and his young daughter.
Contributors
We have a network of collaborators around the world, who we work and exchange ideas with on a regular basis.
Wei Huang
Wei Huang is a Chinese-born Australian designer formerly based in the Schengen Zone. Wei designs, produces, and engineers fonts, and he has created a number of type design plug-ins with Dinamo. He's also currently working with us on a few new typefaces .
Omnigroup
Omnigroup is a graphic and type studio based in Lausanne, Switzerland, run by the Venice-born Leonardo Azzolin and German-born Simon Mager. Leonardo and Simon met Fabian and Johannes while working as teaching assistants at ECAL in 2016, where they quickly realized they share a common interest in type and furniture design. Since 2018, Omingroup and Dinamo have been working on a project together, centered on their shared interest in the Swiss type educator Walter Käch.
Mingoo Yoon
Mingoo Yoon is a graphic and type designer based in Seoul, South Korea. He met Johannes in Seoul in 2016, where they had a conversation about new possibilities for Hangul typefaces. A few years later, Mingoo began work on Favorit Hangul, a Hangul extension of Dinamo’s Favorit. Currently, Mingoo works as a bi-scriptual typeface designer and teaches at the local arts university.
Tabitha Swanson
Tabitha Swanson is a designer and creative technologist. She presents herself as a migrant from a virtual world, using 3D rendering, AR face filters, and synthetic makeup on her own body. Tabitha and Dinamo first collaborated together on the t¥p3w0rld facefilter, which allows users to transport themselves to a virtual world of 3D letterforms.
Moritz Tontsch
Moritz Tontsch is a motion and media artist working in the extended realities of AR and VR. With Dinamo, that’s taken the form of translating memes into face filters. Moritz is currently leading a course at the University of the Arts in Berlin on AR face filters, and he continues to investigate the socio-cultural implications of the pervasive ironic styles visible in contemporary aesthetic practices.
Sam de Groot
Sam de Groot is a graphic designer, teacher, and occasional publishe/musician based in Amsterdam. He has worked on a few custom typefaces with Dinamo, one of which is currently being redeveloped for a commercial release. Currently, Sam is trying to catch up on work whenever his four-year-old twins are napping.
Actual Source
Actual Source is an American graphic design studio, publisher, and book store founded by Davis Ngarupe and JP Haynie. It’s currently based in Utah, and first collaborated with Dinamo for issue five of its Shoplifters magazine. Dinamo initially designed ABC Camera for the issue, which Actual Source later adopted as the typeface for its own visual identity.
Chi-Long Trieu
Chi-Long Trieu is the brains behind the engineering of most Dinamo releases. Chi first met Johannes in Amsterdam and then the pair met again a year later in London. After Chi left his job at Optimo Type in 2016 and flew to New York, he met Johannes again, and ever since he’s been Dinamo’s Font Engineer.
Hardworking Goodlooking
Hardworking Goodlooking was established in 2013 as a publishing hauz devoted to the decolonization of tropical aesthetics, vernacular artisanship, and the value of the invisible. It is composed of Clara Balaguer, a cultural worker in the Netherlands, Kristian Henson and Dante Carlos, graphic designers in the United States, and Czar Kristoff, an artist in the Philippines. HWGL is an offshoot of the Office of Culture and Design, a platform for cultural social practice that was founded in 2010, based in Parañaque City, and laid to rest in 2018.
Tanja Modrakovic
Tanja Modrakovic is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary designer. She was born in Bosnia and grew up in Zagreb, Croatia, where she completed her studies in visual communication. She met Fabian and Johannes in Milan during their variable type workshop, and in 2020, she joined the team to help out with typeface designs. She also works in the field of UX/UI design.
Immo Schneider
Immo Schneider is a Berlin-based designer and long-time family member of Dinamo. His first, essential contribution to the Dinamo portfolio was drawing Favorit Lining’s numerous glyph-shapes, and completing the typeface’s automated version. He now runs a practice combining artistic collaboration with commission-based graphic design work, applying an open-ended attitude to the design process.
Humans & Machines
Humans & Machines believe in the beauty of highly efficient interaction experiences. Combining a design-minded approach with a deep understanding of digital environments, its team create adaptive solutions for brands that share its dedication. The Berlin-based studio is behind the co-design and development of our current website, and it continues to work on its day-to-day maintenance, streamlining, and growth.
Manuel Rossner
Manuel Rossner is a Berlin-based artist and designer who works on digital environments. In 2019, he founded Hightype, a foundry specializing and focused on three-dimensional typefaces. Hightype’s first font, HT Standard, was made in collaboration with our team at Dinamo.
Daniel Wenzel
Daniel Wenzel specializes in utilizing animation-tools and code for the fields of graphic and type design. He is usually involved in the Dinamo projects that challenge the static nature of typefaces, for example, typefaces that use variable font technology or take the form of gifs. Most recently, he’s worked on ABC Ginto’s variable iteration.
Jakub Straka
Jakub Straka is an art director and graphic designer originally from a city of miners: Ostrava, Czech Republic. After spending almost a decade in Amsterdam, where he met Dinamo while studying at Rietveld Academie, he re-settled in Prague after getting an opportunity to launch VOGUE Czechoslovakia, where he works as an art director to this day. Jakub used to code (he was co-author of the first two Dinamo websites), but now he’s pursuing his new-found interest in fashion photography.
Frequent Collaborators
Golgotha
Golgotha is a Paris-based design studio founded in 2013 by Antoine Aillot, Marvin De Deus Ganhitas, and Guillaume Hugon. Its multidisciplinary approach is based on the team’s wide array of skills, including: artistic direction, graphic design, video production, 3D animation, scenography, illustration, etc. Drawing simultaneously on American blockbuster movies, Japanese manga, video games, and digital art, Golgotha has a unique graphic sensibility. For our website, Golgotha designed the futuristic player cards for each Dinamo teammate.
Obby & Jappari
Obby & Jappari is a graphic design and 3D rendering studio based in Frankfurt. It was founded in 2019, and the studio’s core team is made up of Obby, Jappari, and Pia Graf. Obby & Jappari are behind the visualization of Dinamo's brain galaxy rendering (scroll up), which represents the foundry's many satellite locations, fuelling our team members' work screens.
bus.group
bus.group is a creative service for metaphysical sightseeing. From its Berlin-based office, the team develops contemporary visual content in partnership with people and organizations across the cultural and corporate fields. Together, bus.group are art directors, 3D artists and graphic designers. For the launch of Dinamo 3.0, bus.group selected characters from each of the foundry’s typefaces and gave them some extra skin. You can find these animated CGI deployed across the website—ABC3D style.
(Past & Present:) Andrea Anner, Gianluca Alla, Studio ARD, Angelo Barbattini, Scott Barry, Sophia Becker, Malte Bentzen, Selina Bernet, BNAG.cc, Shamma Buhazza, Simon Burgunder, Louis Brousseaud, Thibault Brevet, Anna Cairns, Vincent Chan, Curaprox, Studio Dumbar, Gustavo Ferreira, Damian Fopp, Alberto Guerra & Roberto Alesi & Alessandro Cacurri, Vladimir Ivanenko, Daniel Chessari, Frédéric Jaman, Risto Kujanpää, Zach Liebermann, Dan Solbach, Stink Studios, Florian Lamm & Jakob Kirch, Stefan Marx, Mirka Laura Severa, Maximage, Moonsick Gang, Rob Milne, Adeline Mollard & Katharina Reidy, Paul Mylecharane & Ziga Testen, Nayo Kim, Node Berlin/Oslo, Céline Odermatt, Laura Opsomer, OtherMeans, HelloMe, Anja Kaiser & Jim Kühnel, Eloise Harris, Zweihundertkilo, Nejc Prah, Indrek Sirkel, Y-u-k-i-k-o, Living Systems
Thank you ✨
Our Practice
We regularly work with a variety of companies and institutions, offering advice and solutions to decision-makers with whom we share a level of mutual-understanding. This is what we can contribute to the conversation:
- Retail typefaces
- Custom and bespoke typefaces
- Creative direction
- Logo and word mark consultancy
- Apparel and physical products
- Type design tools and plugins
- 3D and AR typefaces
- Workshops and lectures
Take a look at our custom projects
Select Clients
Acqua di Parma
Bad Bonn Kilbi
Bauhaus100
Collins
Cyprus Pavillon (Venice Biennial)
Dazed & Confused
Discord
Estonian Pavillon (Venice Biennial)
German Pavillon (Venice Biennial)
GOAT
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Istituto Svizzero
The International Olympic Committee
JOOPITER
Kunsthalle Zürich
Laytheme
Manifesta 11
MIT
Netlife
Nike
Planet Mu
Re-Wire Festival
RIMOWA
San Francisco Symphony
SSENSE
Stedelijk Museum
The Monthly
The Book Society Korea
Tumblr
Warp Records
Yale Architecture Press