Dinamo’s ABC Gravity returns with 6 weights for each of its widths

ABC Gravity always had every width. Five years on, it finally has the weights to match. When Berlin-based type design studio Dinamo first released the display typeface in 2021, it set out to answer one question: how wide can type go? Aesthetically, Gravity sits in the lineage of Compacta, Information and Impact, the titling typefaces of the ’60s and ’70s, though Dinamo drew it in a far softer, friendlier way, holding off the point where the curves turn straight and rigid until as late as possible along the width axis – get past ‘Condensed’ and things warm up instantly. In its first life, it was picked up by everyone from print titles like GQ Korea and Dazed to the Berlin Opera, the NBA and Nike, and eventually the Kardashians. Now the studio has reversed the question to how light it can go, and answered with five new weights that sit beneath the original. Growing the one headline weight into six for each width, all manually calibrated, took Dinamo close to two years. The Hairline came easily. “Since it is basically the lightest stroke possible before it gets too thin to print, all the lines have almost the same stroke thickness, and it doesn’t require much modulation or optical correction between the horizontals and the verticals anymore,” explains Co-founder & Head of Type Design, Fabian Harb. “The drawing is super straightforward: easily measurable and controllable and therefore fast.” The difficulty lived in the middle-masters – working out how long the design could stay monolinear and from where it needed contrast, so that each new weight led cleanly into the pre-existing Ultra styles and still animated smoothly as a user slid across the axes. “Luckily, we not only had a super senior but also a relentlessly patient collaborator, Connor Davenport, who tested and pushed it with us until we found all the sweet spots,” Harb adds.