Studio
Dinamo is a Swiss type design agency that offers retail and bespoke typefaces, design software, research, and consultancy. We have spaces in Basel and Berlin, and satellite members in various other locations. Members of Dinamo are visiting teachers at various art academies and have been invited to give workshops and lectures at an international roster of educational 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. Dinamo has released more than 20 typeface families to date, and continues to oscillate between commercial and cultural projects.
Team
Our team works together on a day-to-day basis, either in our Basel and Berlin studio, or remotely.
Fabian Harb
Co-Founder
Fabian Harb is originally from the mountainous Appenzell Ausserrhoden in Switzerland, but currently lives in Basel. He splits his days between being involved with the co-running of Dinamo (80% of his time) and running after his five year old son (20% of his time). 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. Suddenly, he won the “Most Beautiful Book in the World” prize, after which he forced himself to retire from graphic design and co-founded Dinamo. Johannes is involved in the day-to-day oversight of the foundry, its people and many sprawling tentacles.
Robert Janes
Type Designer & Engineer
Robert Janes is Berlin-based type designer and engineer hailing from Melbourne, Australia. He joined the Dinamo team in 2018 and has since been spinning various plates, including creating typefaces, mastering releases, and developing new tools for in-house workflow. Robert is currently designing a handful of typefaces to be published with Dinamo later this year, while also exploring his Italian roots through semi-regular cooking escapes.
Vanessa Olt
Business Intelligence
Vanessa Olt originally grew up in a small village in Hessen, Odenwald, and has now lived in Berlin for over eight 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, and to lead its Business Intelligence team. Venessa has recently taken her services to the next level by co-founding a financial consultancy for creatives with Rea Stamatoulakis called Nea Kosma.
Madeleine Morley
Writer & Editor
Madeleine Morley is a Berlin-based writer, editor, and researcher originally from London. She shared a studio with Johannes when she first arrived in Germany, and is now Editor at Dinamo, having joined the team to help with the launch of the new website in 2020. She studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge and Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and is currently writing a book on kitchenware. Additionally, she’s in the midst of co-founding a new online magazine and community space for design research called Futuress.
Christina Lehmkuhl
Licensing Officer
Christina Lehmkuhl is a Berlin-based freelance designer with a straight-forward-no-bullshit-type-heavy-approach, which occasionally swerves into digital spheres. She joined the Dinamo family in early 2019, when Johannes recruited her to be the foundry’s Bounty Hunter a.k.a Licensing Officer. This means chasing and taking care of all things licensing-related, with the added benefit of getting to know Dinamo friends old and new along the way. She also helps with any type of customer support and takes good care of our Hardware division.
Rea Stamatoulakis
Data Analyst
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. This particular subject has currently taken her on a deep dive of funerals.
Elias Hanzer
Type Designer
Elias Hanzer is a Berlin-based graphic and type designer originally from Vienna. He met Johannes during his graphic design studies, and while dipping his toe into type design waters for the first time. Ever since, he’s been a long-time collaborator and friend of the Dinamo family. As well as his own type design practice, alongside Lucas Liccini, Elias co-runs the practice Hanzer Liccini.
Erkin Karamemet
Type Designer
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 Designer
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.
Andree Paat
Type Designer
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, after which he became obsessed with fonts. Five years later, Andree worked on Dinamo typefaces Maxi and Oracle. At the moment, he juggles his time between graphic and type design, teaching, Dinamo, and his young daughter.
Tanja Modrakovic
Multidisciplinary Designer
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 since the beginning of 2020, she’s joined the team to help out with typeface designs. Apart from Dinamo, she works in the field of UX/UI design.
Immo Schneider
Graphic Designer
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.
Artists & Family
Since Dinamo first began, we’ve built long-standing relationships with like-minded type designers and artists. The people in our family often take on a double role, contributing not only to the daily work-life of the foundry but also publishing 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, it’s 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 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 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, currently teaching 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 the wild Galapagos typeface adventure together. Felix is currently developing new items for his label, as well as a column on the relationship on 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 Laica with Dinamo after a series of lovely email exchanges and Skype calls; this particular 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 corrupt the rules and misuse the tools of type.
Kaj Lehmann
ABC Synt
Kaj Lehmann is a graphic designer based in Zurich, Switzerland. After Johannes and Fabian got their hands on the 17th issue of 'zweikommasieben' magazine, which Kaj designed and co-publishes, they immediately asked him to extend its bespoke typeface, named Synt, for a Dinamo release. Three years later, Kaj continues to refine the font (stay tuned!), and also works on commercial and personal projects in the cultural field.
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 or 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 by chance, Johannes was also in the city at the time, so Giliane teamed-up with Dinamo to work on its first printed specimen. Today, Gilane is devoting her time to her own studio and teaching practices.
Contributors
We have a host of collaborators that we work and exchange 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 occasionally uses them too. He has created type design plug-ins with Dinamo and is currently working on a few new typefaces with the foundry. Aside from type-related activities, Wei is currently undertaking the 5/3/1 powerlifting program.
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 designer and teacher Walter Käch.
Mingoo Yoon
Mingoo Yoon is a graphic and type designer based in Seoul, South Korea. He met Johannes in Seoul in 2016, when they had a lengthy 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 who appears to belong to a new online race. 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 whimsical 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 various contemporary aesthetic practices.
Sam de Groot
Sam de Groot is a graphic designer, teacher, and occasional publisher-slash-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 (or, corona 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 designed a typeface for the issue called CCTV, 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 pretty much every Dinamo release. Chi first met Johannes in Amsterdam—to give him a bike—and then the pair serendipitously met again a year later at a gathering for type enthusiasts in London. After Chi left his job at Optimo Type in 2016 and flew to New York, he hung out with Johannes for 10 consecutive days. Since then, he’s been Dinamo’s trusted 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.
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 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 Ginto’s variable iteration, and is currently finalizing an upcoming project called Hot News.
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 J & F 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
(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 ✨
Dinamo Website 3.0
In 2020 with the design of our new website, Dinamo’s brain power grew exponentially. Here’s to the team that made it happen.
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, they create adaptive solutions for brands that share their dedication. The Berlin-based studio is not only behind the co-design and development of our new website, the journey has been a rewarding experience for everyone involved.
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 that can be summarised in one word: Epic. For this website, Golgotha designed highly detailed, futuristic custom figurines for each Dinamo teammate.
Obby & Jappari
Obby & Jappari is a graphic design and 3D rendering studio based in Frankfurt, Germany. It was founded only a year ago, 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 (simply scroll up), which represents the foundry's many satellite locations, which fuel the team members' daily working lives and Slack channel conversations.
bus.group
bus.group is a creative service for metaphysical sightseeing. From their Berlin-based office, they develop contemporary visual content in partnership with people and organizations across the cultural and corporate fields. Together, they 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 their animated CGI extrusions deployed across the website — ABC3D style.
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 section
Clients
“Bless our clients, who have trusted and commissioned us to design typefaces for their project spaces, corporations, and institutions.”
—No one
Acqua di Parma
acte
Bad Bonn Kilbi
Bauhaus100
Collins
Cyprus Pavillon (Venice Biennial)
Dazed & Confused
Estonian Pavillon (Venice Biennial)
German Pavillon (Venice Biennial)
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Istituto Svizzero
International Olympic Committee
Kunsthalle Zürich
Laytheme
Manifesta 11
MIT Boston
Netlife
Nike
Planet Mu/Knives
Re-Wire Festival
Rimowa
San Francisco Symphony
SSENSE
Stedelijk Museum, Holland Festival
The Monthly
The Book Society Korea
Tumblr
Warp Records
Yale Architecture Press
Teaching
Jobs
New positions will always be communicated here and/or on our social networks. We’re always looking for new collaborators to work with and prioritize applications by minority groups in type design and other creative fields.
Please write to jobs@abcdinamo.com
Contact
DINAMO BASEL
Klingelbergstrasse 11
4056 Basel
Switzerland
mail@abcdinamo.com
+41 76 801 75 55
More contact options