Dinamo is a type design studio that offers retail and custom typefaces as well as design software and consulting services. From our Berlin studio, we collaborate with a network of team members across the globe, oscillating between commercial and cultural projects of varying scales.

We are a group of graphic designers turned type designers, and we draw from our own experiences when designing fonts and pricing them. As well as producing the fonts in our retail library, we work closely with clients spanning art and culture, fashion, commerce, and technology. Broadly speaking, research, experimentation, and collaboration are at the heart of our practice. We’re not just interested in what’s happening in culture—we’re actively engaged in cultural conversations too, producing our own Hardware products, bi-monthly newsletter, and publications on a regular basis.

We generally love to test ideas and create turbo prototypes whenever something comes to our minds. When something feels right—either for a client based project or in our library context—then we step into developing the idea right away. Other times, these tests just drop into a kind of “idea dump” and we might come back to them later again.

If an idea goes into proper development, then we usually put together a lil’ team to work on it—dreamwork is teamwork. Once everybody involved is happy with the concept and the look of something, we often assign the production/extension to just one or two among us. For this phase of the project, it’s often good to have minimal communication and maximal synchronization. After the glyphset is complete we either space and kern it ourselves, or give it to Igino or another collaborator to do it for us. And after then proof it as a bigger team again.

Once the fonts start feel satisfying to the entire design team, the project goes over to our communication team and all their work around the communication and release starts. Usually we brainstorm all together what could be a nice storyline around a typeface, and what kind of creatives beyond our own team could be involved to create a campaign. This campaign gets shipped out as our newsletter, The Dinamo Update.

Probably anything between “days” and “years” really. Some typefaces like “ABC Connect” for example, that are straightforward and “idea-heavy”, the creation of them can happen in a few hours.

But other designs can almost feel “endless” in our speedy times: “ABC Social” for example started as a single-weight test that we made for a magazine redesign that our friends Paul Mylecharane and Ziga Testen’s were involved in. Over the course of their involvement we kept tuning and adding styles with different widths, and then when they handed over the design to an inhouse design team, we agreed that they could use it exclusively until the magazine would go through the next redesign. Around 3 years later that happened, and since we still liked the sketch, we developed it further. Together with Malte Bentzen, we tested a Hairline master; later we were able to collaborate with Wei Huang again for a bit, and expanded the weight spectrum up to a Black. We then got pulled into a custom project for RIMOWA and had to pause it all. So, only a year or so later we got back to it again. This time we managed to gain Erkin’s excitement for the project and pull it all together and add Italics as well. After that we planned to release the design publicly—but then somebody in the team came up with the idea to also add a Mono sub-family, since we already had a width-axis. After another pause, they were eventually designed by our team member Fabiola Mejía, and “concluded” the project after almost 10 years.

We have a great studio space in Berlin, Neukölln that most of us work from. I myself have my studio in Porto, Portugal. We generally do one day of remote work where everybody is free to work from wherever they want. And sometimes we also get the chance to travel for workshops or lectures or so, and add a few more days to stay and work from those places—which usually is very inspiring/rewarding.

Obviously there isn’t just one way to go about this that works for all of us in the team (there are over 20 of us now!)… But what we all really like to do is talk and discuss together, and see whether there is another perspective or idea in the group that could be tried out. Also, sometimes when it’s possible we “pass the problem around”. Or if none of the above works, we just pause a project and work on something else for a while, and then hope to get back to it later again with a fresher mind.

Both (and basically any other of our tools so far) have been reactions to needs or problems or un-happiness at the studio.

The Gauge Tool for example was the “quick control” that we didn’t find in the software that we used at that moment (RoboFont, i think) when we designed Favorit (a rather restrictedly drawn low-contrast typeface). Both Johannes and I did not know how to create such a tool, so we reached out to Wei Huang, who we first met in Gustavo Ferreira’s “Python for Typedesign” workshop and knew would know. At some point we decided to just upload it to our website and give everybody access to it.

And with the Font Gauntlet it was very similar. When we first started to experiment with variable fonts, there weren’t many apps to visualize the axes at all. But since we became interested to (mis-)use the technology also for visual effects and in interactive ways, we just started to develop our own test-environments. Robert Janes, who was working with us at the Dinamo studio at that time, also knew how to create web developments—so it was just obvious and easy to build it all as a site. In that way, the Gauntlet was always “public”. But it did take us a while to find a good name that was still available as a .com-domain. And it also is a tool that keeps developing today, as the use of variable fonts and our need to visualize and animate them keep evolving.

So bottomline, none of our tools really have started with the idea to become “open tools”—but more just evolved to become so, proving to be helpful to many over time and therefore clearly needing to be shared.

So far, the development of tools has always has been a reaction to internal problems or challenges or workflows. For example, to make the maintenance of files simpler, our font engineer Hugo Jourdan just created a script that allows us to work from one file, and with this one, generate subsets from each script, because we were struggling in a vast multiscript project.

All tools definitely all share an initial (and often quite-a-bit-longer-than-expected) trial-and-error period before we were first satisfied with their functionality and then feel ready to publish them.

We also have tools integrated into our website for making font licensing simpler and more personalized for our customers, and this is something we also think and care a lot about. These are often created because we get a lot of queries and emails from customizers asking for something specific, and we see that there’s a need for a tool that responds to it. For example, we’ve integrated a Font Customizer at checkout, where people can choose which alternate to make their default. We had a lot of emails asking for alternates as defaults, so we realized we should make a tool. This is another part of our tool-making-universe that’s worth flagging!

For us, developing and publishing tools has never been something that we wanted to become a business-arm: We always offer our tools for free use. But also, we try to not get pulled into having to offer support or user-assistance for them.

Absolutely: Both in terms of how the Dinamo studio looks and functions, but also the structures that we use to create our typefaces and tools has continuously changed—and likely keep doing so!

When we started out designing typefaces, there was way less software available. We first started with FontLab, then did a little detour to RoboFont and today work with Glyphs and a lot of proprietary scripts and tools for production and mastering.

As for our designs, we always had a very computer-heavy process and only a very few of our team members are sketching extensively by hand. For finding new shapes, at the moment we often experiment with variable font setups where parameters can be established, controlled and mixed/combined easily.

For the moment, it doesn't have a strong impact on our work—but of course: the power of it is crazy and potentially could have a big impact on what kind of work will still be possible and stay exciting in the future. We’re very supportive of production aided technologies of course—but there is a risk as well that creative work gets impacted and de-valuated.

At Dinamo, we are mostly interested in conceptual approaches towards type design; as well as the whole framing and storytelling around the designs. So, for the moment we dont feel that AI is an immediate threat to us. But there might be (bigger) changes resulting from it to the industry at large. And that of course does also impact and therefore concern us.

Production aided tools that simplify or even automate repetitive processes and tasks like building accented glyphs, case-sensitive alternates, or even kerning seem to be welcomed by pretty much all of us in the field. Not exactly “new” anymore, but also the possibilities that variable font technology opened up in the last few years was/is great. And of course the ever-improving possibilities and technical support around multiscript projects has been super exciting for us.

For a long time we ve been dreaming of a tool that supports us in proofing and documenting the typefaces we design. And since Hugo joined our team last year, we finally have a bit more engineering capacity and the time to develop it. We still need to figure out a few technical things and make some final decisions on the functionality and UI—but the end is near so we can’t wait and “wish we were there” already!