Acclaimed Berlin-based type foundry Dinamo are well known to us at Creative Boom: we recently shared their work on a new dot font based on furniture screws and regularly feature them on our best new typefaces roundups. So it’s with excitement that we hear they’ve recently designed a new custom typeface for Spotify in collaboration with Spotify’s in-house creative team called Spotify Mix.
The new font represents a major milestone for Spotify, the world’s most popular audio streaming platform, as it continues to evolve its brand identity and user experience.
Spotify Mix will be used across all its apps, desktop experiences, branding and marketing materials moving forward.
Conceptual roots
According to Dinamo, Spotify Mix is “rooted conceptually in ideas of remixing and functions as a vast toolbox that allows for extreme typographic flexibility.”
At its core, it’s a variable font with an expansive width and weight range, along with a rich array of alternate characters. This versatility perfectly positions it for dynamic and expressive typography, whether in static designs or animated motion graphics.
“Spotify Mix is, quite literally, a typographic remix,” Dinamo explains. “It combines elements you’d find in geometric, grotesque, and humanist typefaces and blends them together.” This innovative approach fuses the sharp flicks of humanist strokes with the smoother curves found in grotesque letterforms, resulting in a distinctive flow and rhythm.
Symbolic meaning
Of course, the symbolic meaning here is pretty obvious. By mixing different classic typeface genres, Spotify Mix aims to represent the incredible diversity of music genres, artists, podcasts, and other content that populate Spotify’s vast audio universe.
One of its standout design features is the almond-shaped counter space found in letters like p, d, and g. This seemingly subtle detail serves as another metaphor by subtly alluding to the transmission and expansion of audio waves. Three sets of numbers, meanwhile, invite further play and variety.
To further customise the typeface’s expressive range, Spotify Mix includes three distinct sets of numerical figures, inviting designers to play and explore even more creative possibilities.
New typographic direction
Thomas Huygen, Chief Marketing Officer at Spotify, expresses his enthusiasm for the new typographic direction. “At Spotify, we’re obsessed with enhancing how our users discover and experience the world’s catalogue of music and audio content,” he says. “With Spotify Mix, we now have a brand-new custom typeface that perfectly captures our identity as curators of the ultimate remix: the remix of creative expression across genres, cultures and artists.”
For the team at Dinamo, this collaboration with Spotify represented a landmark creative challenge. “This has been a gigantic, out-of-this-world project, and we’re very excited that its rollout has begun,” they declare. “We’re incredibly proud of the result of this special partnership and can’t wait to follow its journey as Spotify Mix makes its debut across Spotify’s platforms.”
As Spotify Mix begins appearing across Spotify’s digital ecosystem and marketing campaigns in the coming weeks and months, we’re starting to see how artfully crafted type is able to encapsulate a brand’s identity and values. From what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to do a brilliant job.
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