Back in 1936 the German Standards committee Deutsches Institut Normung (DIN) proposed DIN 1451 as the standard type of lettering for road signage. As the original manual states ‘the purpose of this standard is to lay down a style of lettering which is timeless and easily legible’.

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While Din Display seems to retain DIN’s basic characteristics, it shines with its sharper corners and contemporary look. Completed in 2002, it was first released and published in Parachute’s award-winning 2003 catalog and immediately was a hit.

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Back in 1936 the German Standards committee Deutsches Institut Normung (DIN) proposed DIN 1451 as the standard type of lettering for road signage. As the original manual states ‘the purpose of this standard is to lay down a style of lettering which is timeless and easily legible’.

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Back in 1936 the German Standards committee Deutsches Institut Normung (DIN) proposed DIN 1451 as the standard type of lettering for road signage. As the original manual states ‘the purpose of this standard is to lay down a style of lettering which is timeless and easily legible’.

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The letters DIN refer to the Deutsche Industrie-Norm, the German Industrial Standard; among their many uses, these typefaces are seen on most road signs and license plates in what was formerly West Germany. One of the primary criteria for the DIN Schriften design was a facility for reproduction. There are four geometric sans serif typefaces, of roughly the same weight but of various widths, from quite round to condensed.

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Designed at ParaType in 1997 by Tagir Safayev.

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Uni Sans is a custom sans font which is applicable for any type of graphic design - web, print, motion graphics etc and perfect for t-shirts and other items.

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Pill Gothic walks the tightrope between a heads down, hard working, utilitarian sans and something that stands out, saying, “Look at me!” Designers looking for a type that will work in blocks of text for callouts, captions and headlines will find that unique balance with Pill. Pill Gothic asks the question: what is the effect of a few truly unique characters on the meaning of a type? In particular, the ‘a’ and the ‘g’, while relating strongly to the forms of the other characters, stand out from the traditional milieu of sans serif types. The name Pill Gothic came from early studies of the condensed weight where the lower case characters had the shape of a pill capsule.

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Helsinki is inspired by the Finnish traffic sign type.

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Orcin Sans is a functional well crafted sans serif typeface available in 6 styles.

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A clean and simple sans-serif, Informatic was designed as a friendlier alternative to DIN.

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When I first approached this design back in 2003 I wrote myself a design brief that called for a simple sans serif “avec serifs” (with serifs).

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Geheimagent is perfect for restrictions, or permissions if you prefer. Not quite a textfont, not quite a headlinefont, it’s a bit of both.

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Aerohop is a contempory sans serif font with shades of non-contemporary design elements. A neo-classic face with a full character set, three weights, and italics.

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No Dr. was inspired by an old movieposter lettering for the 1962 movie "James Bond: Dr. No".

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Cyrus Highsmith drew Scout and related logotype for Geraldine Hessler’s redesign of Entertainment Weekly. The large family marks the magazine’s first significant typographic update in a decade. Captions and sidebars are set in Regular and Bold; Light, Black, and Condensed styles form the backbone of the display. Scout’s form derives structural elements from both new and old: DIN, Venus, and Cairoli.

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Geogrotesque is a semi modular with a subtle rounded finish typeface. All the characters are based in the same formal principle with its corresponding optical adjustments in order to adapt the system to an alphabet for texts. Although the type family has a geometric or “technological” construction, the rounded finish provides it a warm appearance, making the typefaces nicer and nearby.

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Geogrotesque Stencil is the newest member of the popular Geogrotesque family, it has been thought as a display typeface, but it goes one step further and tries to solve some of the typical problems of stencils fonts.

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A contemporary interpretation of grotesque (historic) typestyle, relying on geometric shapes applied to a grid. Idiosyncrasies within the typeface are based on how this grid is constructed and applied rather than those inherent in drawing type with a pen or cutting from a block of wood. Other grot types retain the quirks of original woodcut typefaces. Elephant has a different vocabulary of quirks that remove it from being too reverential or constrained to a historic context.

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Shortly after the collapse of the communist regime, a revolutionary atmosphere culminated at the studio of typography at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. The 1990s were characterised by the deconstruction of traditional type design. The construction of typefaces didn't conform to established proportions anymore — the frame was often self-supporting, and if not, it became a mere framework in which a narrative was told. On the one hand designers attempted to grasp and interpret the atmosphere of freedom of the 1980s, represented by David Carson and Neville Brody. On the other hand they feverishly attempted to appropriate anything that surrounded them in their daily lives, moulding those everyday elements into shapes that would vaguely resemble type. Most of these typefaces only appeared briefly on posters, sometimes just once. Only a few were applied in other design projects, which ensured their longevity. But for most of them their ephemeral lives quickly came to an end.

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Based upon CA BND (the clean version) CA BND Trash is a rough and dirty version of our favorite DIN-like font.

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TX Switch and Switch Box are number 3 of 7 in the series asking how can personality described through handwriting be translated into typefaces? Each element of the analysis was matched by a moment and/or technique found in type history. The strokes of the case study’s pen are constructed and extravagant, indicating creative expressiveness. Geometry and 1920s modernist ideals provided for the perfect base in the early design stage. The observation of dramatic switches in pen stroke directions was represented by using a more condensed and tight construction. At the same time, the typeface is spacious and unmodest. TX Switch Box was designed as a companion typeface, also tapping into the sentiment behind street graphics. This drop shadow was rendered in the same spirit as the craft of sign painting. Both styles were inspired by the art of letterpress printing, old books, comic books, hobo writing and the commercial arts. Open, honest and hard working, Switch’s design is about everyday markings, places and the familar landscape of Main Street, Anytown USA. Attention getting and legibility are the key components.

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Designed for the Glasgow 1999 typeface competition, Factory explores the idea of taking elements from Gaelic letterforms (as an historic British typestyle), such as the use of cut-off curved forms that suggest the action of writing, and re-interprets them for the late Twentieth Century. These are set against the circle-based geometry that the Macintosh produces so flawlessly to create a typeface that looks like it has been manufactured from a set of prefabricated units, like a ship or a car.

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A type face lighter than air, if it is possible to express something like this by typographic means. But the name does not make a difference. This mosquito-like Grotesk appropriately complements the jobbing steel-engraver’s scripts Splendid and Excelsior, and is, therefore, suitable for designing letterheads and graphic materials for personal representation. Medium and Black weights have been added recently to improve the range of application of this type face. Ideal font for captions, footnotes and headlines, it appears legible from 3 point size.

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ThinPen is based on an ancestor of the German DIN-Schrift. The font was traced with a plastic template on transparent paper, scanned and worked over carefully to keep the handmade, authentic touch.

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Bougainville was inspired by many of my favorites and has been on the drawing board in excess of ten years. Only this year I decided to expand the original 1994 design to include other weight variants.

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Superbastone is a linear font in the style of the classic gothics with a more geometrical design (i.e. in the same way of DIN);

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Monospaced but no mono space.

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Vagebond is a monoline family in three widths, Condensed (C), Normal (N), and Extended (XT). With Vagebond I was inspired by a very old television I once saw on a junkyard. I wanted to create a typeface with round edges that would fit within the 4 x 3 proportion of the screen. It had to be monoline, because that gives it a very simplistic and minimalistic look.

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Coconut is a round and heavy unicase font with the techno, squarish, grid-based squeeze that of late seems part of almost every contemporary pop designs. It works as the 21st century display substitute to tired last-century horses like Frankfurter, VAG, or the rounded Helveticas, Futuras, and DINs out there.

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Cape Arconas legendary obsession to create a DIN-like font substitution brings us to CA BND, named after the German Intelligence Agency.

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In 1968, American Type Founders produced OCR-A, one of the first optical character recognition typefaces to meet the criteria set by the U.S. Bureau of Standards. The design is simple so that it can be read by a machine, but it is slightly more difficult for the human eye to read.

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In 1968, American Type Founders produced OCR-A, one of the first optical character recognition typefaces to meet the criteria set by the U.S. Bureau of Standards. The design is simple so that it can be read by a machine, but it is slightly more difficult for the human eye to read.

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Ganymede is a geometric linear font combining industrial and architectural themes.

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The idea of a brand-new grotesk is certainly rather foolish – there are already lots of these typefaces in the world and, quite simply, nothing is more beautiful than the original Gill. The sans-serif chapter of typography is now closed by hundreds of technically perfect imitations of Syntax and Frutiger, which are, however, for the most part based on the cool din-aesthetics. The only chance, when looking for inspiration, is to go very far...

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The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute “Transitional”, as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This “transition” was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a “transition” from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so.

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The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute “Transitional”, as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This “transition” was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a “transition” from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so.

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The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute “Transitional”, as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This “transition” was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a “transition” from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so.

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DIN stands for Deutsche Industrienorm, German Industrial Standard. In 1936 the German Standard Committee settled upon DIN 1451 as the standard font for the areas of technology, traffic, administration and business. The Committee chose a sans serif font because of its legibility and because its forms are also easy to write. This font was not foreseen for advertisements and other ‘artistically oriented uses’ and there were disagreements about its aesthetic qualities. Nevertheless, this font was seen everywhere in Germany, on signs for towns and traffic, and hence made its way into advertisements because of its ease of recognition.

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The German Standards Committee suggested the ‘light Neuzeit-Grotesk’ font in 1970 for use in official signage, traffic directional systems, etc. The typeface had been designed by Wilhelm Pischner and appeared with the font foundry D. Stempel in 1928. The font Neuzeit Grotesk was once the standard in the print industry, as a timeless typeface with no real distinguishing features. Like other typefaces of the 1920s, DIN Neuzeit Grotesk reflects the philosophy of the times, ‘Form is Function.’

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ITC Conduit was designed by Mark van Bronkhorst based on the letters on ordinary signage done by a non-professional. He took the regular but awkward forms and added his experienced sense of design and proportion...and in the process broke almost every rule. The forms were made with a grid, “like the 90 degree corners in real conduits with all the tips and corners rounded off.” A few optical corrections produced ITC Conduit, a fairly narrow, square and highly legible sans serif typeface.

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The Neuzeit Office family is designed after the model of the original sans serif family Neuzeit S™ , which was produced by D. Stempel AG and the Linotype Design Studio in 1966. Neuzeit S itself was a redesign of D. Stempel AG’s DIN Neuzeit, created by Wilhelm Pischner between 1928 and 1939.

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