Diario- Fundición Dinamo

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DINAMO

Martes 20 Octubre 2020

DINAMO

Welcome to Dinamo 3.0! We’re celebrating the launch of our new diario with the release of #ABCDiatype...

Essentially, Dinamo is a Swiss type design agency offering retail and bespoke typefaces, design software, research, and consultancy. We have spaces in Basel and Berlin, and satellite members in various other locations.

ABC DIATYPE Tumblr is a microblogging platform that allows its users to post texts, images, videos, links, quotes, and audio as a tumblelog.

As part of the most recent redesign of Tumblr, we updated its iconic logo and developed a custom typeface for the platform.

ABC MAXI

ABC Diatype is a warm yet sharp grotesque, ideal for text and reading on screen. We’re releasing it today to occupy an unfilled spot in our library as our first warm-hearted grotesque.

ABC Maxi is a heavily-engineered yet warm and witty type system of spaghetti movements and angular lines. Its familiar shapes, informed by the long history of the International Style, can be newly exaggerated and emboldened by way of variable font technology.

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Our new site better represents where we are today and how we’ve grown as a foundry and network. Dinamo 3.0 has been developed and co-designed by the complexity-loving, beautiful minds at Humans & Machines, who first got in touch because they were trying to buy one of our typefaces, but our web store wasn’t working… So began a fruitful, two-year partnership.

Learning from Humans & Machines has been immensely inspiring, both professionally and personally.

Alongside the new design and functionality of Dinamo 3.0, we’ve made a few significant updates to our font licensing model, so that it’s hopefully fairer to smaller studios, cultural initiatives, and agencies. Additionally, to inaugurate our website launch, we’re immediately releasing two much-anticipated font families: ABC Maxi and ABC Diatype. You can read more about them below, along with other Dinamo 3.0 highlights, including our new VF tutorials, student discounts, Different Times t-shirt, team trading cards, and custom naming system, just to name just a few off the top of our heads.

For this new typeface, we partnered with Tumblr’s in-house creative studio to customize our own font, ABC Favorit. This involved cutting new characters, interpolating new weights, introducing rounded punctuation, and scaling the typeface’s overall appearance. Tumblr’s team built a standalone iOS tool to support the

DINAMO WEBSITE 3.0 We find that VFs are an after-thought on font retail websites. They’re usually wedged into old, static structures, which don’t make explicit the full range and extent of their possibilities.

After years experimenting with this new technology and seeing how we could push it to its edges, we decided to approach our own font retail pages in an entirely VF-orientated way.

While browsing our typefaces for instance, a VF player lets users sit back and watch any chosen font animate and stretch across its various axes.

Dinamo Darkroom, our previously separate website for sharing internally-developed type tools, has now also been integrated into the main site. To encourage more experimentation and exploration of VF capabilities, we also created a space for tutorials by our Font Engineer Robert Janes. These appear—news alert —in our newly introduced News section, with Robert’s first piece instructing users on how to begin efficiently and creatively using VFs on the web.

Co-founders

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

As part of the most recent redesign of Tumblr, we updated its iconic logo and developed a custom typeface for the platform.

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.

testing of various iterations and optimizations of the design.

In order to stylistically align with the custom typeface, we recut the t and r characters of Tumblr’s logo. Other letters received smaller updates: We cleaned up overly subtle features and imbued the forms with a crisper, more architectural feel.

Eliminating curved intersections helps optimize the logo for small screens—no matter what size, it doesn’t lose its essence.

Most notably, we strategically removed the logo’s period, so that the new logo and typeface can integrate in an open-ended way across all platforms and contexts.

Tumblr began quietly implementing the first cuts of Favorit-Tumblr across its platform in June 2017. A year later, Tumblr rolled out the new logo and fully implemented Favorit-Tumblr across all of its web and app products.

ABC MAXI

Our previous website represented the early days of Dinamo. It was developed entirely from scratch by “one person big band” Jakub Straka, who studied with Fabian and Johannes in Amsterdam. We owe our structure and growth as a foundry to him, so as we see our first website fade away, we do so in gratitude to its original designer. Thank you, Jakub.

Tumblr renovation

ABC DIATYPE

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Dinamo 3.0 has arrived

DINAMO

Martes 20 Octubre 2020

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G ABC Maxi is a heavily-engineered yet warm and witty type system of spaghetti movements and angular lines. Its familiar shapes, informed by the long history of the International Style, can be newly exaggerated and emboldened by way of variable font technology.

With an underlying skeleton referencing mid-century and post-modern Swiss designs—including Josef Müller-Brockmann’s CWS word mark (1958) and Marlyse Schmid and Bernard Müller Swatch logo (1981)— Maxi’s forms can by altered and ani-

mated by the user, stretching from Hairline to Black to everything in-between. While designing the font, we were interested in how subtle manipulations in shape could affect the tone of the overall typeface. To explore this further, we created two stylistic variations for emphasis, rather than a standard Italics. Four subfamilies of the font are therefore available: Round, Round Mono, Sharp, and Sharp Mono. ABC’s Sharp and Round subfamilies have a basic monolinear, rational, and geometric style.

ABC Diatype is a warm yet sharp grotesque, ideal for text and reading on screen. We’re releasing it today to occupy an unfilled spot in our library as our first warm-hearted grotesque.

It began its life during Fabian Harb’s student days, as an eager exploration of the Swiss Neo-grotesque genre; its name harks back to the clunky, pre-digital typesetting machines that informed its shapes. After a variety of versions created by Fabian for different school projects, ABC Diatype then transformed into a slightly ligh-

ter Regular. A while later, it had its curves polished, and finally its terminals were closed horizontally.

ABC Diatype made its first public appearance in 2013, featuring on posters for Oslo10, a temporary exhibition space in Basel, designed by graphic designer Dan Solbach. Dinamo friend Rob Milne uses it for the Melbourne-based contemporary art journal ‘Discipline’, and the Milan studio Dallas also used it for its identity for Istituto Svizzero in 2017.

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Primera edición del ABCDiario Todos los derechos de autor reservados a los diseñadores gráficos y editores principales Sebastián Díaz y Francisca González