Understanding DIN.
Curated by The Monotype Studio
DIN is an acronym for Deutsches Institut für Normung, which translates to the German Institute for Standardization, a national organization for standardizations. They specify thousands of technical standards for mechanical things like nuts and bolts, screws, and beams. Typefaces and technology have a long relationship together, and the DIN typefaces are no exception.
The German government needed a way to unify labels for the railway in the early 20th Century, so they released a lettering template of sorts, which was then adapted to a typeface by Stempel in 1923. The DIN organization numbers all of their standards, so the typeface was labeled DIN 1451. After it became a standard for road signs and license plates, it was adopted by graphic designers for its purity of geometric forms and precise, efficient looks.
How to tell them apart
At first glance, FF DIN and DIN Next can look very similar, but these details often inform a preference.
- DIN Next has a slight rounding effect on the corners, softening the appearance a bit. Sometimes the sharp edges of FF DIN are preferred.
- The FF DIN also has flat, horizontal terminals on the condensed styles, where the DIN Next has angled terminals that make a more open aperture.
FF DIN
In the 90’s, FontShop used the DIN issued typographic concepts and were expertly expanded into a contemporary font family by Albert-Jan Pool. It was later expanded to include Rounded variants as well as Arabic support. The main family supports a healthy character set including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese.
DIN® Next Paneuropean
DIN Next has been expanded over the years, even quite recently, to include Rounded, Stencil, Slab serif and Decorative variants. Support for the Greek and Cyrillic scripts are included in the Paneuropean packages and even available Devanagari and Arabic scripts make these fonts perform their duty in even more markets.
DIN 2014
Paratype designed their own DIN version, with a similar remastering in 2014. Paratype is known for designing excellent Cyrillic additions to popular typefaces, which these cuts have, but they lack Greek support. Their Stencil is different from the DIN Next Stencil—try both—the details might work better for a particular headline or brand.
DIN 1451
Before the DIN Next remastering, Linotype published the DIN typeface named with the DIN specification number, 1451. If you know that schrift means script or font in German, it can help distinguish style names. Mittelschrift is the “middle font,” meaning the regular weight while Engschrift is “narrow font,” the condensed style.