Get in, loser! Dinamo’s auto-inspired typeface has arrived, with 108 fonts in the boot

INT: With a project that is five or six years in the making, how much has changed along the way, and how do you stay motivated?

SM: Luke, Johannes and Chris Lawson (who I share a studio with and who’s working on a book for Schengen), I couldn’t have done it without them, that’s what motivated me, that’s what gave me structure. Conversations with Luke were just exciting, he brought a great energy and curiosity to things.

JB: Seb has been orchestrating a symphony with lots of different instruments, lots of different players. In this long process he’s been synchronising the fonts over and over, refining and changing proportions, and I think one of the things that’s also special about Schengen is that you can interchangeably use the fonts. The wishful thinking is that somebody would combine Schengen – different Schengens – like we see on the reference vehicles. In terms of drawing and managing this monster project, you had moments where you had to suddenly rethink a structure or proportion, maybe two years in, and you had to keep updating. How did you go about that, and keep going?

SM: We had to constantly look at the designs in relation to each other, questioning what these different typographic voices are good at, and how they should communicate. Schengen A is really concerned with capturing the tension between Helvetica and Eurostile, but also logically it’s probably the easiest typeface that you’d set in long form, so the spacing and the proportions should work in that space. When we went up to C, the idea was that the spacing got tighter and the proportions and the rhythm got more uniform because when you widen a typeface – if you have very large differences in proportion – then they stop working as well at large widths.

Figuring out that side of the A, B, and C typeface allowed us to move on to Line, Zone and Core because we had a kind of more graphic side and a more usable bookish side. Soon, it became clear that Zone, Line and Core should complement Schengen B and C in their usage.

At a certain point we stopped thinking about making a set of alternates, or a set of shapes that could be used to make everything feel consistent. Like, ‘should the capital of G, of A, B and C be the same as the capital G in Zone, Line and Core in terms of the structure and base form’ – it was quite tempting in terms of driving a really clear line through the design. But it was really freeing, the admission that it doesn’t actually matter whether these are exactly the same form, because it’s about the spirit. Each sub-family, or each family, has its own alternates that relate to its own design. In some ways they’re really their own typefaces, but they’ve been designed in relationship to each other.

INT: It seems like you have so much fun creating the campaigns.

JB: Yes! Mimi Schmidl on the team is an amazing renderer and a sweet visual artist too – an artist first, 3D person second. We pitched this logistics world to them and they really loved it, and immediately started rendering some trucks. It was an internal brief for us to cast vehicles – we wanted a broad spectrum that you can find on the streets of the Schengen Zone, big and small. Some are more funny, like the monster truck. But then there’s the service van that I see in front of my house that my landlord uses, bringing that everyday aesthetic.

We then commissioned Asel Tambay and Barnaby Ward to design the graphics on the vehicles. That was an interesting process, giving Schengen to somebody and then being like: go, run with it! We had some fun deciding what should go on the trucks. It’s almost like a logistics poem. You can read through the vehicles and it kind of makes little sense: it says things like ‘Schengen Express Service’ or like ‘Logistics Distribution Services’. We really do involve a lot of people, it’s just the way of working that we like. I think on one hand, type design is so much about control and precision, so on the other hand, I like to balance it with getting people and their opinions, making something really rich.

SM: There’s this feeling of trying to have a lot of chaos, a lot of aesthetics clashing together that somehow sort of makes sense. This is the closest I’ve worked on a campaign – it’s been really fun trying to formalise the exact story of this typeface. Without the campaign, I don’t think it would be possible to communicate it properly.

JB: Yeah, there’s this productive chaos – like going out onto the street. You hear noise, you have a very clean street next to a messy road. It’s really diverse and this is a good mirror I think for the whole project and times that we live in.

INT: When designing, did you ever have ideas for the sort of projects Schengen might work well in, or is it something that you can only know when you see it in situ, when you see it come to life in someone else’s vision?

JB: I see big party posters using Zone and Core, and maybe books set entirely in Schengen B.

SM: I think you have dreams, right, like Johannes is saying; dreams of Core being used for a techno music festival poster campaign. But yeah the crucial part of type design that’s really fun and sometimes really curious is how it gets used. I think one of the first times I saw Ginto was back when I was living in London on the side of a massive scaffolding for a food delivery service. I would never have guessed that a food delivery service would use that font, and to come across it in that particular way at such a massive scale was really strange. It's not something you expect and that’s what’s so fun.