Just My Type
The ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t-o-r, designed by BNAG and ABC Dinamo (image: Fabian Frinzel).
In 2014, a love story began with a stumble. BNAG, a German product design studio, wrote an email to the Berlin-based type foundry ABC Dinamo asking to use one of its fonts for free. Dinamo agreed and the world seemed perfect. But word of this union didn’t spread. “Someone in Dinamo’s team saw our project online and thought we’d stolen the font,” Oliver-Selim Boualam, co-founder of BNAG, recalls. “We received a warning.”
And yet love found a way. Learning about the mix-up, Johannes Breyer, co-founder of Dinamo, stepped in to clarify the situation, and invited Boualam and Lukas Marstaller, BNAG’s other co-founder, for beers. It was, Boualam says, an “instant match”. Marstaller concurs: “This never felt like a one-night stand. It was obvious that this had a future.” Flirtations bubbled away throughout the years and, in 2019, the relationship moved to a new stage. Dinamo asked BNAG to create objects for Hardware, a retail venture that the foundry was planning to focus on type-inflected product design. “Our fonts are created digitally,” explains Fabian Harb, co-founder and head of type design at Dinamo. “We send them to clients and then the beautiful objects [that result] are created somewhere else. Hardware is a reaction to that.”
At the time, BNAG had already worked on a project called the 1-2-3 Chair, which explored a dot-based system for joining wood using metal brackets, screws and typography. “We were super-happy with the chair, but the project always felt like a prototype of a prototype,” says Boualam. “When Dinamo contacted us, we thought pretty quickly that maybe this was the project we could develop.”
In fact, Dinamo’s proposal became the perfect moment to progress product and type’s romance into a relationship. The results of this cooperation are the ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t-o-r-s: metal brackets perforated with a matrix grid.
The system invites users to insert nails or screws through its grid to connect timber components. Thereby, even non-professional makers can build individualised furniture such as chairs, benches and tables. In addition, the screws can be arranged within the matrix to form the letters of a typeface. The full ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t-o-r-s pack consists of eight plates of five different sizes and styles, which are accompanied by an instructional zine for inspiration. In the spirit of blurring type and industrial design, the matrix grid led Dinamo to release a digital dot font as well: ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t. The dots that make up the letters are shaped like screw heads, and the mono and proportional font comes in five styles, as well as Italics.
Much like falling in love, the process of designing the ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t-o-r-s hardware and typeface wasn’t linear. “It was like ping-pong,” says BNAG’s Marstaller. “We aligned the typeface to the grid and the grid to the typeface.” And, as love often does, it took time to grow. Five years of ping-ponging was needed to finish the project, because both studios had to balance this self-initiated affair alongside commercial work. The pandemic added complexities too. In the end, however, the ABC C-o-n-n-e-c-t-o-r-s saw the light of day, launching at the end of 2023. Type design hooked up with product design. The digital kissed the physical. Wood married metal. A perfect love story.
Words Ines Glowania
Photograph Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #37. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.