Dinamo’s Johannes Breyer on the process behind innovative sans to serif superfamily ABC Arizona

The result of an intense, three-year collaboration between its creator Elias Hanzer and Swiss type design agency Dinamo, ABC Arizona is the first-ever sans to serif superfamily that packages its five styles – Sans, Flare, Mix, Text and Serif – into one single variable font file. To learn more about the process of bringing such an ambitious project to life, we caught up with Dinamo’s Co-founder Johannes Breyer. EM: How did the team come together to release Arizona via Dinamo? JB: I first met Elias when he was participating in a type design class at UdK that I was teaching. He interned with us in Berlin right afterwards and ever since, he’s been a close friend and collaborator. While Elias was setting up his own practice with Lucas Liccini – Hanzer Liccini – he began Arizona and we started talking about releasing it with Dinamo. We’d been playing with Variable Fonts in the studio for a while and were spending a lot of time trying to find fantasy axis: with Whyte, for example, we were experimenting with the concept of an ink trap axis. Elias was wondering what axis he could introduce that hadn’t been explored before, and he came up with the idea of a sans to serif axis. He wanted to blend the notion of a superfamily – a family of different genres housed together under one roof – with new variable technology, so that everything was packaged into one file. We all thought it was almost impossible, but worth trying.