Lindemann Sans is an unusual but immediately inviting typeface with a pleasing distinct visual voice grounded by geometry and golden proportions. This project started in early 2008, when designer Chad Lindemann (an Associate Professor of Art at Wisconsin Lutheran College) was set out to create a geometric sans serif font with traditional ideals, but with a modern tech-savvy voice. Chad was inspired by the mathematical golden ratio and the Fibonacci spiral. This mathematical logarithm appears everywhere in nature from leafs, flowers, pinecones, and most commonly nautilus shells. He incorporated this natural spiral into his final versions of Lindemann Sans.

After choosing this spiral as the cornerstone of the design, the next step was to create a spiral matrix in Adobe Illustrator. This matrix was used in creating all 800 glyphs found within each font. It was the skeletal structure for many design decisions, such as, the x-height being three spirals high, most glyphs being two large spirals wide, and the dissection of multiple spiral intersections to form the angles for many of the curves found within the typeface. An unintended surprise was how clearly Latin glyph shapes could be housed within this matrix and how the spirals themselves became inspiration for the curves found within the finished typeface. Also, many of the lowercase terminals, spurs, and tails were derived from the Fibonacci spirals.

According to Chad Lindemann “it did not become immediately apparent, but all design solutions can make new challenges. When creating Lindemann Sans, this challenge was between balancing personal aesthetics and the mathematical spiral matrix. Thanks must be given to Professor Josh Cross’s perspective that designing a typeface is no different than any other artistic venture. In addition, thanks to Professor Paul Burmeister for his encouragement. Paul never stated the obvious challenges facing designing a geometric sans typeface, but always gave words of wisdom and shared his knowledge of how others solved issues of stem, stroke and crossbar weights within single glyphs. Next, the clear and confident direction, expertise, and advice from Panos Vassilliou was extremely helpful. His advice addressed the ink traps and black concentrations of joints within the lowercase glyphs, which were problems that could not be resolved with a spiral matrix, but only with creative artistic decision making”.

Some aspects of the final version of Lindemann Sans that are the most appealing in retrospect are the inventive open form counter of letter a, the tails found on the letters f, i, and t, the slanted bar of letter e. These special glyphs and many more work as a family to create the specific voice of Lindemann Sans. Each style and weight of Lindemann Sans adheres to the same geometric and golden proportions, however, each weight is innately noteworthy. For example, there is a charm that is found in the ultralight weight’s elegant geometry and lights impressive use as oversized headlines. It shines with true clarity of vision with the book weight and the versatility of the medium. One cannot overlook the power and pacing of the bold and extra bold weights with its clear counters and restrained letter forms. Within Lindemann Sans family each weight has a distinctive role to play but stays true to its purpose.
PF Lindemann Sans is available from Parachute.

Sendai is a new 6-weight type family by British designer Philip Kelly. Some of you may not know but Philip was part of the renowned Letraset Type Studio for 25 years. While at Letraset he built a large number of Letraset’s classic display typefaces under the direction of Colin Brignall. He is credited typefaces such as University Roman, Pump, Algerian, Gillies Gothic and Croissant.

His latest design Sendai, is a text typeface with slightly condensed shapes that help save space and also achieve punchy display headlines. The restrained serifs are a nod to the Latin styles of the past.
Sendai was conceived around 2001 and has been developed slowly ever since. The typeface began its life with larger, more Latin-like serifs. The quirky h, m, n, and r ’shoulders’ came later; likewise the ‘roll-arounds’ on the B, D, P, R, b, d, p and q.

Philip wanted the design to be slightly condensed to help with economical text setting, but not so condensed that legibility would suffer.The slight condensation makes for punchy display settings such as book jackets where space can be tight.

The fonts are available exclusively from Philip Kelly Digital Design directly.

Despite the fact that over the years several designers have manually created stencil lettering for various projects based on DIN, there has never been a professional digital stencil version of any DIN-based typeface. After the successful introduction of DIN Monospace a few months earlier, PF DIN Stencil now completes Parachute’s extensive library of DIN superfamilies. It was based on its original counterpart DIN Text Pro and was specially designed to address contemporary projects, by incorporating elements and weights which are akin to industries such as fashion, music, video, architecture, sports and communications.

Traditionally, stencils have been used extensively for military equipment, goods packaging, transportation, shop signs, seed sacks and prison uniforms. In the old days, stencilled markings of ownership were printed on personal possessions, while stencilled signatures on shirts were typical of 19th century stencilling.

Two companies dominated the market in the mid-twentieth century: the Marsh Stencil Machine Company in the United States and the Sächsische Metall Schablonen Fabrik in Germany. Ever since the late 1930s, it was the German Sächsische Metall Schablonen Fabrik which used heavily the new DIN 1451 standard font (introduced in 1936), attempting to overthrow the reign of the Didot-style modern roman which was at the time the most common stencil letter in Germany.

These letters were manufactured mainly as individual zinc stencils which could be ordered in sizes between 10 and 100mm. The DIN Stencil family manages to preserve several traditional stencil features, but introduces additional modernities which enhance its pleasing characteristics and make it an ideal choice for a large number of contemporary projects.

Furthermore, the spacing attributes of the glyphs were redefined and legibility was improved by revising the shape of the letterforms. The DIN Stencil family consists of 8 diverse weights from the elegant Hairline to the muscular Black. Currently, it supports Latin, Eastern European, Turkish and Baltic.

Parachute® has created over the years some of the most sophisticated contemporary typefaces, supporting simultaneously hundreds of languages. Typefaces such as the Champion Script Pro, Centro Pro, Handbook Pro, Beau Sans Pro and of course the DIN Pro series, have been appreciated and used by designers worldwide.  Now, for the first time, the competitive DIN Text Pro family is enhanced with Arabic. Parachute® collaborated with designer Hasan Abu Afash to create 2 new versions. DIN Text Arabic is the basic Arabic version which includes Latin and supports all variations of the Arabic script such as Persian, Urdu and Pashto. The second version DIN Text Universal is the most advanced DIN superfamily ever. It combines the powerful DIN Text Pro with DIN Text Arabic. All together it supports hundreds of languages, proving to be an essential tool for corporations which operate internationally.

We spoke to designer Hasan Abu Afash about the 2 new DIN families and this is what he told us: “The particular project was very challenging as we had to not only design a matching Arabic version but also incorporate within the same font 4 different scripts i.e. Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek -bringing the number of glyphs to 3320 per font- as well as enhance it with 30 advanced opentype features and kerning for all languages. It took about a year to complete the whole family which consists of eight weights from extra black to hairline.

The brief was clear. We wanted to match Arabic to the other three scripts in a way that will not compromise its cultural integrity or disturb the essential qualities of the Arabic script and its powerful tradition. Furthermore, our goal was to create an arabic superfamily with typographic value and a variety of weights to accommodate a wide range of text and display needs”.

The design methodology
The Arabic script has a number of different styles of calligraphy, so obviously the very first step is to decide which style is most suitable. It was decided to use the kufi style since its simple geometric and uniform shapes can relate better to sans serif fonts such as Din Text. For a small number of glyphs though, the naskh approach was implemented in order to blend softer familiar shapes with the more stiff geometric nature of kufi. This is in tune with the font’s original guidelines to make the latin part of the DIN standard more ‘typographically correct’.
The project was divided into 2 major stages: the design stage and the programming stage. During the first stage, Hasan worked closely with Panos Vassiliou who supervised the project. A long time was spent to get the base glyphs right for the very first weight. A lot of discussion took place and several alternate forms of each letter were designed before an agreement was reached for their final shape (blue highlight).

According to Hasan, “I started the matching process by harmonizing the optical weight and height of the alif and then proceeded to work on tah comparing its optical weight and shape to that of latin b and n. No attempt was made to match elements of the arabic letters to the latin x-height as arabic does not have a single equivalent to the x-height. I revised and adjusted both alif and tah a number of times at this stage. This provides a good starting point for the harmonization, while leaving most of the other Arabic design decisions independent. I designed seen as a hybrid model based on kufi with a couple of naskh details. I completed the glyphs and waited for Panos’ comments who also made further adjustments to my designs. Then an encoding file was created to include all arabic glyphs according to Unicode 5.2 and was further enhanced with an extensive array of arabic ligatures“.

As soon as the whole set of glyphs was completed, Hasan moved on to the following stage which is programming. There are several opentype features such as mark positioning that are still not supported by FontLab, so the next best solution is Microsoft VOLT which has a very powerful interface for programming complicated scripts such as arabic.

Kerning is equally important as any other part of programming. This particular family already included a large number of kerning pairs for scripts such as Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, but several more were added for Arabic. The last section of programming was allocated to mark positioning which is a very tedious and time consuming process.

As soon as the design work and programming for the regular weight was completed, Hasan focused on the extra thin and bold weights, while Panos completed the design for extreme weights such as hairline and extra black. There’s only eight variations to DIN Universal and DIN Arabic. Italics are not included as italic is not really an option used for arabic.

Quality Control & Fine Tuning
During the implementation period we run several tests on screen and numerous pages were printed to check the typeface under operational conditions. Proper mark positioning was extensively tested and double-checked, troublesome glyphs and marks were highlighted and sent back and forth for further adjustment and fine-tuning.

Large type families with thousands of glyphs are prone to glyph misplacement. To eliminate such a possibility we devised  two sets of print tables which we used to check the proper position of glyphs as well as do a thorough test on opentype features.

Summary
DIN Universal is Parachute’s most ambitious text typeface, as for the first time a contemporary arabic equivalent to this comprehensive DIN series of fonts is designed. In fact, this set of fonts contains the most complete and powerful array of arabic features commercially available. The four major scripts Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek are now matched across the design of the whole family, respecting at the same time each one’s modern cultural identity. With its vast array of weights, the extended support for numerous languages, its careful and detailed design, it will prove to be extremely valuable for many complex corporate international projects. On the other hand, the scaled down DIN Arabic is a less expensive version for designers who are mostly interested in Arabic.

Links
DIN Text Arabic
DIN Text Universal
Arabic in an emerging global market

PF Din Mono is the latest addition to the ever-growing set of DIN superfamilies by Parachute®. It was based on its proportional counterpart DIN Text Pro, but was completely redesigned to reflect its new identity. DIN Mono is a monospace typeface which is comprised of characters with fixed width. Traditionally, monospaced fonts have been used to create forms, tables and documents that require exact text line lengths and precise character alignment. DIN Monospace, on the other hand, can prove to be more than a useful typeface for technical applications. In the world of proportionality, DIN Monospace stands out as a fresh new alternative to the popular standard, particularly for publishing and branding applications. Additional care was given to the aesthetic form and its pleasing characteristics. The spacing attributes of the glyphs were redefined and legibility was further improved by revising or changing the shape of all the letterforms.

For instance, characters such as ‘m’ and ‘w’ were made narrower and other like ‘f’, ‘i’, ‘l’ and ‘t’ were made wider in order to fit into the default character width evenly. As a result, the stem thickness for some characters was altered but was balanced out by adjusting the overall color of the glyph.  Furthermore, kerning was not included in order to preserve the monospace nature of this typeface.

The Monospace family consists of 12 weights including true-italics. Currently, it supports Latin, Eastern European and Baltic. A new Din Mono Pro version is in the making and will be released soon. It will be offered as an upgrade to all licensees of the simple Mono version. Altogether the Parachute DIN series is a large set of 5 sophisticated super families with a total of 72 weights. It includes the following families: Text Pro, Display Pro, Text Condensed Pro, Text Compressed Pro and Mono.