Bold opening: A bold, vehicle-inspired revolution in typography has arrived, and it’s not shy about its industrial roots. Dinamo’s new Schengen release packs 108 fonts, plus three companion revivals, into a single, high-octane family that channels the energy of cranes, trucks, docks, and factories. Here’s a clearer, beginner-friendly walkthrough of what makes Schengen tick—and why it matters.
What Schengen is and where it came from
Dinamo Designer Seb McLauchlan and co-designer Luke Charsley collaborated on a six-year project that began with a simple prompt: capture the cadence of industry and the motion of transport in a typeface family. Schengen draws its spirit from well-known industrial staples—Helvetica, Eurostile, and Serpentine, among others—and asks a bold question: how can width and rhythm shift to remain legible and expressive across contexts, from long-form paragraphs to bold display work? Unlike traditional widening, Schengen’s approach flattens and graphic-izes the space as it grows, creating a distinctive, kinetic vibe rather than a straightforward extension.
A collaborative backbone
Schengen’s scale demanded many hands. Luke Charsley stepped into a leadership role, guiding a wider team while Seb maintained the tonal vision and standards. The result is a project that feels cohesive, yet deliberately diverse across its sub-families, each with its own character yet designed to harmonize with the others. The team emphasizes that the strength of Schengen lies not in forcing perfect uniformity, but in preserving the “spirit” of the design across voices.
The family and its companions: Zone, Line, and Core
After rounds of conversations and testing, the team expanded the idea into a broader ecosystem:
- Schengen A, B, and C: the core typography voices, balancing tension between classic sans forms and the more graphic, wide-forms that emerge as you widen the width axis.
- Schengen Zone, Line, and Core: serif and display companions that extend the concept beyond sans, offering a broader tonal palette. Zone leans into bold, impactful serifs; Line echoes a compact, productive rhythm; Core presents a Haettenschweiler-inspired, punchy core.
These companions aren’t exact visual twins of Schengen’s sans cousins. Instead, they’re harmonized relatives that share a recognizable spirit while serving different practical roles in layout and typography projects.
Why 108 fonts? purpose, not vanity
The team acknowledges that 108 fonts sounds expansive, but they argue it serves a practical purpose: giving users precise control over vibe and readability. Some designers will reach for Schengen A Book for longform text; others will want the semi-bold or display weights for posters, branding, or signage. The intention is to empower editors, designers, and students to dial in a specific mood with confidence, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all solution.
The reference process and world-building
Reference gathering is a constant, messy practice for Dinamo. The team treats fonts like characters with backstories and movements, imagining how they would exist in the real world—on roads, in ports, or on signage. This imaginative world-building isn’t just aesthetic; it underpins the material’s marketing and campaign visuals, including a playful, transport-themed campaign that ties the typography to its manufacturing-and-logistics roots.
Campaigns, production, and the thrill of release
The Schengen campaign visuals were crafted with collaborators like Mimi Schmidl (rendering) and designers Asel Tambay and Barnaby Ward (vehicle graphics). Vehicles become a moving canvas: trucks, service vans, and other fleet imagery carry the Schengen voice, reinforcing its industrial identity while offering a tangible, almost tactile sense of what the typeface can do. The team treats the release as a collaborative proposal to the design community—an invitation to see Schengen in action across real-world contexts and languages.
Beyond the initial release: future directions
Even after launch, the Schengen project keeps evolving. Extensions into Greek and Cyrillic scripts are in development, recognizing that a truly global utility requires multilingual reach. And as the team jokes, accessories like a Freitag bag collaboration could be a natural extension, blending typography with physical goods and everyday life.
Bottom line: why Schengen matters for you
If you’re a designer who loves clean, purposeful type with an industrial edge, Schengen offers a robust toolkit: multiple weights, complementary serif and display options, and a design language that feels both modern and retro in just the right ways. It’s a reminder that type can be more than legibility; it can convey velocity, equipment, and a sense of place.
Discussion prompts
- Do you prefer a strict visual consistency across type families, or a looser, more interdependent set of sub-families that share a vibe while preserving individuality?
- How do you weigh the value of a very large font family (108 fonts) against the complexity of selecting and maintaining it in a project?
- In what kinds of projects would you most love to see Schengen’s Zone, Line, and Core come to life? Festival posters, industrial branding, transport signage, or something else?
If you’d like, I can tailor this rewrite to a specific audience (e.g., typography students, branding teams, or general readers) or adjust the emphasis (historical context, practical usage, or design philosophy). Which angle would you prefer?
