Dinamo’s industrious practice and visibility has made the Swiss type design studio a notable force in the world of type design. Despite this growing notoriety, Dinamo, founded by Johannes Breyer and Fabian Harb, is far from unapproachable—a delightful quality in an age of hyper-controlled personae and online identities. They lecture and give workshops at schools and institutions around the world. They commemorate their ideas and travels with runs of tees, embroidered letter jackets, desert hats, and—soon—ear plugs and sleeping masks. They flash knowing smiles as they pose for the camera. They Instagram pics of their typefaces making appearances out in the world like proud parents. 
The following interview with Dinamo—winners of a 2017 Swiss Design Award for their “light-footed approach [that] exceeds the traditional representation of type design”—dives deep into the minds of Johannes and Fabian as they reflect on their practice and output.
Ryan Gerald Nelson (RGN)
You two seem to be keeping busy and on the move! It seems everywhere I turn, there’s a Dinamo typeface or Dinamo lecturing or an embroidered Dinamo varsity jacket or a Dinamo app. I love it. Has this proliferation and pace of work still allowed you guys the opportunity to reflect on what Dinamo is and what it wants to be?
Johannes Breyer (JB)
What I appreciate about type design is the various roles and levels of intensity it offers. You can dive into a quick, spontaneous, mindlessly-dirty sketch, and then leave right before getting too attached to it (as Al Pacino explains in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995): “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner”) or settle into a monkish and meditative mindset in order to develop a raw idea into a comprehensive typeface. Over the past years, we’ve been catapulted into some kind of “rock ’n’ roll” mode of working and taken on whatever our interests, capacities, (studio-) setup, and travel abilities have allowed. So, in a way, I guess our varying output reflects our path (with all its learning curves and detours) quite accurately.
Fabian Harb (FH)
Another reason for our diverse output is that our lives and locations have changed a lot over the past few years. Dinamo vaguely started in Amsterdam in 2013 when we were both experimenting with typeface sketches that we used as tools within our own graphic design work. Slowly, these typefaces started to circulate among friends and prove themselves beyond. Grow was the first typeface we fully developed—with great help from type engineer Gustavo Ferreira—and, after all the effort and investment, felt ready to publish. And with that, the idea to launch a type foundry was as natural as to start working together—and in a sense really created a comfort zone in which everything felt possible. Luckily, Berlin was a logical next destination for both of us individually, and we were able to work on stuff together on the side a lot.
When we were commissioned to design the catalogue for the 2014 Brno Biennale, right after our move to Berlin, it granted us another chance to test out some things that (seemed to) make sense to Dinamo. Since then, we’ve grown a little and moved a lot: I became a father, temporarily relocated to St. Gallen to complete my Swiss Civilian Service, and now live in Basel. Meanwhile, Johannes took on our first-intern-now-first-employee, Erkin Karamemet, and—when he wasn’t dropping his pin in Japan, South Korea, or the USA on extended holidays that he likes to refer to as “self-financed residencies”—managed the studio.
JB
The more time I’m floating professionally in this cosmos, the less precisely I can single out the one thing that interests me most. I’m quite bad with type history and its facts and details—a shame! But one advantage of this ignorance is that I also do not necessarily think of type and type history as something to be preserved or praised. So, I guess I’m more intrigued by mapping out the territory than in the individual aspects of type alone. Type design, to me, is a great format onto which to apply ideas or gestures or technology from all kinds of places, and to later wrap the outcome in cloudy stories. I think of it as a storytelling device.
As for the need for reflection: it’s something that we’re trying to address more consciously than we did before—both in terms of our projects and in how Fabian and I work together as Dinamo. I started to read a book by Cal Newport called Deep Work, which speaks about the phase that begins after you’ve published your first chunk of work as the one that requires the most dedication. You’re trying to understand and prove what you’ve put in prospect. It’s as exciting as it is intimidating to me!
FH
To me, having a background as a graphic designer and still doing design work whenever it feels interesting and manageable is important. I really appreciate the different tasks as well as the variable levels of focuses and speed that occur between designing type, applying type, and all of the other things we do. Designing projects that should have been finished yesterday and which require quick reactions and concentrated energy can inspire and inform our type projects that very naturally take forever and require more reflection and precise decision making—and vice versa. Having explored and learned a lot of new things over the last few years, it isn’t easy to lock down Dinamo in just a few lines. But in a way, to me at least, it’s this blurring of the fields and conventions that has the potential to and maybe even already does define what Dinamo is.
RGN
Can you guys talk a bit about the concept behind your T-shirts and the use of those phrases: “Difficult Times,” “Different Times,” “Spiritual Times”?
JB
“Different Times” comes from my bachelor thesis at the Rietveld Academie, in which I attempted to write about what it means to be a type designer today, holding a mouse in our hands.
Two years after the fact, we had the idea to make a “statement” T-shirt, a reminder that “different times” ask for “different approaches”—very cheesy. The shirt eventually featured five different digital versions of the ubiquitous Times typeface: Times Ten, Times New Roman, Times LT, AT CG Times, and MT Times Bitmapped—all of which are more or less the same and are therefore undermine the shirt’s message.
-
#dinamohardware / Between 2015 and 2017, approximately 550 shirts were produced in the very same print shop producing all of Rammstein’s merchandise. Of these, approximately 178 were gifted to friends for free, 295 were sold at a reduced price, and 34 were lost by the Deutsche Post shipping division.
-
#dinamohardware / Between 2015 and 2017, approximately 550 shirts were produced in the very same print shop producing all of Rammstein’s merchandise. Of these, approximately 178 were gifted to friends for free, 295 were sold at a reduced price, and 34 were lost by the Deutsche Post shipping division.
-
#dinamohardware / Between 2015 and 2017, approximately 550 shirts were produced in the very same print shop producing all of Rammstein’s merchandise. Of these, approximately 178 were gifted to friends for free, 295 were sold at a reduced price, and 34 were lost by the Deutsche Post shipping division.
-
#dinamohardware / Between 2015 and 2017, approximately 550 shirts were produced in the very same print shop producing all of Rammstein’s merchandise. Of these, approximately 178 were gifted to friends for free, 295 were sold at a reduced price, and 34 were lost by the Deutsche Post shipping division.
-
#dinamohardware / Between 2015 and 2017, approximately 550 shirts were produced in the very same print shop producing all of Rammstein’s merchandise. Of these, approximately 178 were gifted to friends for free, 295 were sold at a reduced price, and 34 were lost by the Deutsche Post shipping division.
-
#dinamohardware / Between 2015 and 2017, approximately 550 shirts were produced in the very same print shop producing all of Rammstein’s merchandise. Of these, approximately 178 were gifted to friends for free, 295 were sold at a reduced price, and 34 were lost by the Deutsche Post shipping division.
For some shirts in the series, the “template” was modified according to what was going on in our own lives or in the culture at large when it was published. Hence “Difficult Times” (after Trump’s election) and “Spiritual Times” (on the occasion of a short stay in Los Angeles). So far, five editions have been released with a print run of 120 each, and an anniversary edition in collaboration with the Danish label Wood Wood is about to drop.
RGN
This leads me to Dinamo Hardware, your online merch/product shop. I think it’s great that you guys have this side hustle. But as I say that, it occurs to me that you likely don’t think of this as a side hustle—it’s all tightly woven into the Dinamo identity/brand, right? There’s something about these wearable items, especially the desert hats and the embroidered letter jackets, that are, for me, permeated by this dual vibe of being cult objects, in a sense, and products that have an ironic form and style. It’s no doubt a vibe that today’s internet and Instagram-savvy graphic designers are attracted by. Can you guys talk about your vision for these and future products on Dinamo Hardware and what type of narrative or role these objects/products contribute to the Dinamo identity/brand?
FH
What’s great about Dinamo Hardware is its community aspect and that it complements our typefaces (Dinamo Software) in a very opposed way. To some extent, the Hardware is very different from the typefaces: tangible, wearable, damageable. Yet both follow similar principles in the sense that we’re incorporating or piggybacking tools and everyday objects and (mis)using them as carriers to spread our ideas, perspectives or dyslexic misreadings of recent fashion developments.
JB
On many levels, the “traveling” aspect is key to what Dinamo is and does. The “World Tour,” “Time Zone,” and “World Wide” slogans around which we are building a small world of objects are appropriations from the language used in the business of traveling. It supports our fantasy, or utopia, to live life on the go. Just as typefaces move from A to B and develop a life of their own, so the Hardware does too, and on the way makes visible surprising links between locations, moments, and our community.
RGN
Let’s talk a bit about Favorit. It’s an incredibly popular and pervasive typeface, and for good reason. There’s a connective thread starting from the canon of sans-serifs made within the Swiss International Style that leads to Favorit, but the thread doesn’t exactly take a straight path. The path bends and veers toward a different angle. In my eyes, that familiar-but-different feel is a big part of what makes Favorit so enticing for designers. Can you guys talk about designing and refining the characteristic elements of Favorit (for example, the gracefully truncated bend in the leg of the “R” or the unconventional parts of the “G” and “Q” or the slightly imbalanced numerals) and how those decisions came about?
FH
The starting point for Favorit was an old English grotesque sample, which I believe Johannes first started to digitize for the website of our friend, photographer Joseph Kadow. While ping-ponging ideas for the missing characters around Favorit’s drain-pipe-like linework and architecture, the curators of the Brno Biennale got in touch and commissioned us to design the catalogue for its 2014 edition. It felt only natural to push the typeface further and use it right away. 
After Brno, our friend Till Wiedeck was commissioned to redesign Warp Records and used Favorit for it, which gave us a reason and a budget to extend the character set for other elements of Warp’s brand. Simultaneously, Pascal Storz, Nicola Reiter, Helmut Völter, Fabian Bremer, and Christoph Knoth expressed their interest in using Favorit for the German pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennial, but needed italics, which gave us reason to develop that aspect of the type family. 
JB
Fabian has outlined well how the organically and intermittently Favorit came about. It was never a “design set in stone.” Rather, it was refined from project to project. Lots of first loves were abandoned in the process, while other parts we continued to like throughout the project.
When we employed our first intern, Erkin Karamemet (who is still with us today and without whom almost no other releases would exist), in 2014, we decided to invest time and workforce in extending the Favorit family. We quickly became obsessed with locking everything to measure: the position of the nodes, the length of the handles, by what percentage and by how many units the stems would increase when gaining weight, how far apart the rounded off corners were from each other, etc. This precision-obsessed workflow gave birth to two Robofont and Glyphs plugins that we invented and commissioned to improve our process: “Show Handle Length” (developed by Gustavo Ferreira) and “Gauge Tool” (developed by Wei Huang).
RGN
Have there been any particular revelations / situations / unexpected comments / etc. that have influenced how you guys think about or make decisions in regards to Dinamo? I know you guys have widely lectured, embarked on a “World Tour” of sorts, and been recipients of a Swiss Design Award, among other accomplishments. But I imagine that the accomplishments and attention have also come with, for better or worse, a fair share of obstacles or moments that make you guys take pause. 
FH
A shift in our day to day balance is hard to ignore. Gradually, more things appear from outside the type design field (project and studio management, strategy, administration, distribution, legal matters, and many other territories new to us) and thus the time for internal dialogue has had to be carved out more proactively. In terms of duo-realness, we also realise how important it is to split and organise the labour in a sensible way: keeping the Dinamo machine well oiled includes fulfilling tasks that are less fun than others, so we’re trying to keep up a constant dialogue about that and an eye on how our energies are invested. Also, we’re consciously having conversations about who’s responsible for, or more interested in, or better at doing certain tasks. We try to understand what part of the process within a project we do together and what can be split or outsourced—it’s not always easy and super exciting but you have to maintain the sandbox if you want to keep playing.
JB
Yes, we often feel caught between two poles: on the one side enjoying the increasing responsibility that comes whilst having to learn how to run a type foundry, and on the other, wanting to follow those “right now” impulses, diving into something without need or reason, having the time/space to be silly and mindless, like it was in the early days of Dinamo. Switching between these poles is a challenge, but also fuel for new work. Especially under pressure, it is easy to be carried away and to start reproducing the same formula, not noticing that you haven’t played a new tune in a while.
RGN
While on the topic of your guys’ collaborations, I’m curious to know how your guys’ recent, extensive collaborations figure into Dinamo’s plans and intentions? Do you guys envision Dinamo bringing together many contributing designers and becoming a sort of hub of collective output (as with Lineto, for example). Or is it more casual and embracing of circumstance than that? I’m thinking here of your guys’ collaboration with Felix Salut on the Galapagos typeface and app as well as the recent collaboration with Seb McLauchlan on Ginto. From an outside perspective, these collaborations seem particularly substantial and perhaps suggest the beginnings of a way of operating.
FH
Collaborations always feel like the best excuse to leave our own bubble and work and learn with and from others. Fortunately, we’ve had lots of really exciting and fruitful collaborations so far: with Sam de Groot on various text typefaces; Eric Hu, Matt Tsang, and their team at SSENSE; Other Means for various little jam sessions; Till Wiedeck for Warp; Douglas Richards and his team at Tumblr; Dag Henning with Netlife; Chi-Long Trieu for lots of things behind the curtain; and of course Jakub Straka on various web projects.
Longtime exchanges like the ones with Felix and Seb have helped us to further sharpen our sensibility towards how we want to work with others. In both cases the projects resulted from conversations that were ongoing for some time before the point where thoughts and ideas started to shape up as typefaces. No matter what the project or the task, we want to extend Dinamo with people who we really appreciate and enjoy spending time with outside of work as well.
JB
Then again, I think it’s also important that Dinamo keeps a somewhat clear “line” or an attitude that is consistent and characteristic. I am not sure if that’s a contradiction, but I think that Dinamo has to stay a bit “closed” in order to be “open.” 
RGN
I admire your guys’ playful spirit and humor. I see it run throughout many aspects of your guys’ work, websites, or Instagram posts, or when you two coyly smile for a pre-lecture photo, or when you guys state on Dinamo Hardware: “Stable goods as long as they last.” Can you guys talk more about this sense of levity within your work and personalities?
JB
I guess I was always attracted to the idea of “talking about serious things lightly, and seriously about light things.” I grew up between a joyful South American mother, a translator, and witty German father, an engineer, who both embraced this outlook. Using humour as a device to express a message that we strongly or even dogmatically believe. It allows us to bring a personal voice to what we put out and distribute, which I think is needed nowadays.
FH
Absolutely. I couldn’t add more without feeling like I was trying to explain a joke.
RGN
What does the future have in store for you two?
JB
Learning from our All-You-Can-Eat years, we’ve decided to focus on not more than two external projects per year. We want to return to the World Tour kind of drive and accept commissions or encourage projects based on more personal and less linear criteria: Where is the project taking place? Can we move to that place for a period of time and work onsite? What kind of conversation with the collaborators is possible? Is there enough time to get properly involved? What else, apart from the visual result, could be gained?
FH
That said, we’re very excited about some great stuff happening with the Ginto family by Seb McLauchlan, which we might decide to publicly release into the wild. Maybe even before that, we’ve got a typeface in the pipeline by Larissa Kasper and Rosario Florio—another two friends very close to our hearts. And, hopefully, simultaneously with the publishing of this very interview, our Senior Developer Jakub Straka will launch an extensive rework of our website from the top of Llullaillaco (Chile), the world’s highest active volcano running on Ruby on Rails.
RGN
Thank you for taking the time, Johannes and Fabian! May Dinamo’s year be free of Difficult Times.
Follow Dinamo on the Net: Dinamo homepage, Dinamo Hardware, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.
JB, FH, and RGN extend their thanks to Phil Baber and Eloise Harris for their keen editing.
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.