Parachute® has just released some very elegant DIN hairline weights. Ever since its first appearance back in 2003, the Parachute series has become the most comprehensive and sophisticated set of DIN typefaces ever. With its vast array of weights, the extended support for all European languages which includes Greek and Cyrillic, its careful and detailed design it has proved valuable to many complex corporate projects. Now a new set of hairline weights has been released.

These new weights come to accommodate the needs of some very demanding designers working on several publishing and branding applications. Altogether the Parachute DIN series is an overkill set of 4 superfamilies with a total of 60 weights. Each superfamily consists of 15 weights with an average 1280 glyphs per font.

The Din Text Pro series was based on the original standards but was completely redesigned to fit typographic requirements. It has lowercase ascenders that are higher than the capitals, varying letter proportions and italics that are not a mechanically-obliqued version of the regular weights, but rather true-italics. The letterforms divert from the stiff geometric structure of the original and introduce instead elements which are familiar, softer and easier to read. The other two superfamilies Condensed and Compressed share the same attributes as the original.

Din Display Pro, on the other hand, was designed as an alternative to the Din Text Pro series. While Din Display seems to retain DIN’s basic characteristics, it shines with its sharper corners and contemporary look. This superfamily, just like the other three, is enhanced with true-italics.

Katerina Orlikova is a young graphic designer from the Czech Republic, who enjoys a playful mind with sentiment and childish spontaneity. She always wanted to create something very personal which would let people reminisce about their peaceful childhood years, when nothing was important and the world appeared to be so colorful and gorgeous. After attending a seminar at the university on ”Light and Typography” she decided to create five typographic kaleidoscopes (a combination of the Greek words: kalos - meaning beautiful; eidos - form; and skopeo - I see). Some magical pictures appear before your eyes as light goes through the glittering glass. Katerina used characters made from transparent colored material and converted them into abstract pictures so that people wouldn’t be able to recognize the letters. Using an appropriate type of letters and a printed cover she made the kaleidoscopes with each one representing a type of typeface (serif typefaces, sans serif typefaces, ornamental typefaces …). She admits, “I have not been able to make the bodies of the kaleidoscopes by myself so my handy granddad helped me out! As it turned out, this has been family work that I enjoyed very much!’’.