Back in 1936 the German Standards committee Deutsches Institut Normung (DIN) proposed DIN 1451 as the standard type of lettering for road signage. As the original manual states ‘the purpose of this standard is to lay down a style of lettering which is timeless and easily legible’.

The DIN Text series was based on the original standards but was completely redesigned to fit typographic requirements and includes condensed and compressed versions.

Completed in 2002, it was first released and published in Parachute’s award-winning 2003 catalog and was an instant hit. More…

The DIN Text Pro series is an improved version which was completed in 2005 and enhanced with more weights, multilingual support and opentype features in all different styles. It has lowercase ascenders that are higher than the capitals and italics (just like the first release) that are not a mechanically-obliqued version of the upright weights, but rather true designed italics.

Early in 2010, Parachute® upgraded the series with a new set of elegant hairline weights. These new weights come to accommodate the needs of some very demanding designers working on several publishing and branding applications. Altogether the Parachute DIN series is an overkill set of 4 superfamilies with a total of 60 weights. Each superfamily consists of 15 weights with an average 1280 glyphs per font and 21 opentype features (Din Text Pro supports Greek polytonic as well).

With its vast array of weights, the extended support for all European languages which includes Greek and Cyrillic, 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.