DataLife Engine - Softnews Media Group

In 1936 the German Standards committee Deutsches Institut Normung (DIN) officially proposed DIN 1451 as the standard type of lettering to be used in the field of road traffic. The purpose of this standard was to lay down a style of lettering which is timeless and easily legible. Unfortunately, these early letters lacked elegance and were not properly designed for typographic applications. Ever since, several type foundries adopted the original designs for digital photocomposition. By early 2000, it became apparent that the existing DIN-based fonts did not fulfill the ever-increasing demand of complex corporate projects for more weights and support for additional languages.

Parachute® was set out to fill this gap by introducing the DIN Text series which, ever since, has become the most comprehensive and sophisticated set of DIN typefaces. It was based on the original standards but was specifically designed to fit typographic requirements. Completed in 2002, it was first released in 2003 and published in the award-winning catalog IDEA as a group of 4 separate families (original, condensed, compressed and a special display version). All families include 15 weights each, opentype features (small caps, etc) and extended support for all European languages based on Latin, Cyrillic and Greek.

The DIN Text Pro series, has lowercase ascenders that are higher than the capitals, varying letter proportions and italics that are not a mechanically-obliqued version of the regular weights, but rather true-italics. Each weight consists of an average 1280 glyphs.

The letterforms divert from the stiff geometric structure of the original and introduce instead elements which are familiar, softer and easier to read. The other two superfamilies Condensed and Compressed share the same attributes as the original.

With its vast array of weights, the extended language support, but most of all its careful and detailed design it has proved valuable to numerous design agencies for their complex corporate projects. Additionally, every font in these superfamilies has been completed with 270 copyright-free symbols, some of which have been proposed by several international organizations. This is a set of very useful daily symbols for packaging, branding and advertising. Symbols for public areas, environment, transportation, computers, fabric care and urban life.