They did not intend for the design to be used for advertisements and other artistically oriented purposes. The committee wanted a sans serif, thinking it would be more legible, straightforward, and easy to reproduce. The design was to be used on German street signs and house numbers. In 1936 the German Standard Committee settled upon DIN 1451 as the standard font for the areas of technology, traffic, administration and business. The abbreviation DIN stands for Deutsches Institut fr Normung e.V., which is the German Institute for Industrial Standardization. Recently, they have become more popular than ever, with designers regularly asking for additional weights. Linotype has been supplying its customers with the two DIN 1451 fonts since 1980. DIN Next is part of Linotypes Platinum Collection. Each weight ships in three varieties: Regular, Italic, and Condensed, bringing the total number of fonts in the DIN Next family to 21. Akira Kobayashi began by revising these two faceswho names just mean condensed and regularbefore expanding them into a new family with seven weights (Light to Black). Some people have some really nice stuff to say about the newsletter.ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 1234567890 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Next is a typeface family inspired by the classic industrial German engineering designs, DIN 1451 Engschrift and Mittelschrift. Design Hacks, a 50,000+ person newsletter with original design articles aimed at giving you tactical advice to improve your UX/UI skills.Learn UI Design, my full-length online video course on user interface design.If this is your first time here, you might also be interested in: Likewise, the Helvetica alternatives are clean, simple, and neutral. For instance, the Futura alternatives also have a punchy uppercase, and work in many of the same contexts as DIN. If you’re looking to branch out from DIN, it’s worth checking out some of the other alternatives in this guide. Get it at: Bai Jamjuree at Google Fonts Other DIN Alternatives This is one I recommend to all my students. Nonetheless, for being a very high-quality Google Font, you’ll almost never see this one in the wild. This one is a bit like DIN, but with the brand amped up until it feels like it almost belongs in a video game. The Google Font Bai Jamjuree is even more squared-off and technical than DIN. Get it at: Clear Sans at Font Squirrel 6. What it’s got: 5 weights + 2 italic weights Add to this the fact that you’ll basically never see it in the wild, and this makes a quite decent option for a free DIN alternative. No one is going to mistake Clear Sans for DIN, but everyone can understand it’s got the same overall vibe – squared-off, punchy, and technical. Less a DIN-lookalike than an interesting alternative, Clear Sans remains completely underused. Golos is just as solid a free DIN-alternative for uppercase as it is for lowercase! For UI designers, this means you can use bolding to distinguish active elements in a list – and not risk them running onto another line when bold (causing the whole layout to “jump”). That being said, if you hear about Golos, it’ll probably be in the context of another feature: it’s uniwidth, meaning each letterform takes up the same width, whether it’s light, normal, or bold. The biggest downside is the lack of weights – only 3, and no italics. The new Golos UI is a shockingly close alternative to DIN. Once you see it, the vertical tail just makes sense. In similar fashion, you’ve got to love Barlow’s uppercase “Q”. Plenty of weights, some letterforms even look better than DIN’s (why does DIN have a curved “l”, for instance?). While the “g” is perhaps a bit too distinctive for my tastes, there’s no real reason why Barlow isn’t the best all-around free alternative to DIN. The more versatile Barlow at Google Fonts is closest Google Font to DIN, and perhaps the all-around best free alternative. Gidole is a nice DIN-like open source font, but having only a single weight (and no italics) renders it somewhat impractical. Hopefully the type designer will flesh this one out a bit. The single-weight Gidole at Github was a nice side-project, but is tough to use in the real world. What it’s got: 2 weights + 1 italic weight Here you can see D-DIN continues to be a fantastic alternative. That’s open source fonts for ya! Nonetheless, if you need a spot-on match for DIN in nothing but regular and bold, look no further.ĭIN shines in uppercase, and it’s worth directly comparing some free alternatives in that setting. It all boils down to D-DIN only shipping with 2 weights (and one italic weight). The free D-DIN is a fantastic match, though of somewhat limited practical use. You’re reading Free Font Alternatives: The Ultimate Guide. If you’re looking for free alternatives to DIN, here are 6 of the highest-quality look-alikes and similar fonts.įor each, I’ll mention the advantages, disadvantages, and why you might choose it.
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