Dinamo’s ABC Gravity returns with 6 weights for each of its widths — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

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.

Gravity 1.0 had divided its width axis into 12 static styles, a number that made sense when only one weight hung off it; multiplying those widths by six weights would have pushed the price of the full family too high. “So, not only along the width-axis we singled out the least popular and most un-iconic styles, but also while adding the weight-axis we pushed the increments to their max, to give us the smallest super-family only,” Harb details, trimming the range to its eight most distinctive widths while keeping the extremes as wide and compressed as before. “As it’s 2026 now, we totally trust people to use Variable Fonts and fine-tune their own sweet spots individually.” In the same clean-up, everything previously called Gravity became Gravity Ultra, with Hairline, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black named below it. “We thought about this a lot, of course, but simply nothing better came up,” Harb reveals of the reshuffle.

For all that the family has grown, Dinamo keeps a firm line around what Gravity is. “It has counterintuitively soft and friendly shapes for a design going super narrow, and we exactly love that about it,” Harb explains. “Which means that we’d never build in a contrast-axis and allow people to push Gravity towards ‘Impact’ or ‘Compacta.’” Around that fixed core, the system stays open. The character set is filled with stylistic alternates, such as an alternate ‘G’ and ‘R,’ a set of ‘square punctuation’ and a ‘sharp character’ group, each visibly changing the typeface when applied, and a free Font Customizer lets designers build their own cut. Dinamo also added two unorthodox OpenType features: one shortens the characters for very tight line settings, the other makes them jump the baseline or hang from the top. “None of these features was anything people asked for,” Harb continues, “but we’ve definitely seen it more in use than expected.” With the weights done, Gravity Arabic is next. “A typeface is always a system – and systems can expand,” he notes.

To mark the release, Dinamo made a movie-style campaign, ‘The Return of Gravity,’ whose tagline promises that ‘the font drama continues.’ Its centrepiece is a 10-part comic, drawn by hand, set in the engine room of a type foundry on release day – the flickering corner where, long after the type designers have gone home, someone is still fixing curves, replacing components and rewriting feature code in the endless battle of man versus machine. Dinamo’s illustrator, Melanie Schmidt, drew the comic over roughly 18 months, with no AI involved. “For the font engineer, I immediately thought of Heather Mason from Silent Hill 3 – effortless nonchalance until everything falls apart, and then she locks in,” Schmidt recalls, wanting “a small twist, inspired by games like Undertale” in the story. “Visually, the illustrations owe a lot to Takeshi Obata of Death Note, whose obsessive precision permanently altered my brain chemistry; he taught me that something can feel finished and still deserve another pass,” she adds. Every line was refined digitally before she switched to analogue for the shading, “because apparently I enjoy making my life unnecessarily difficult.”