Dinamo and Seb McLauchlan’s ABC Schengen fuses Helvetica and Eurostile

The Brand Identity: Helvetica arrived in 1957, Eurostile five years later, and between them they furnished the modern industrial world – one stamped across shipping containers, the other lending its softly squared frames to the consoles and title sequences of mid-century science fiction. ABC Schengen takes these two and fuses them together. The result is a type system, planned and built over six years by Dinamo, Seb McLauchlan and Luke Charsley, with 108 styles drawn around the visual language of the Eurozone’s logistics, manufacturing and construction industries. Fusing the two faces turned out to be the straightforward part.

Helvetica and Eurostile were designed within five years of each other in countries that share a land border. For most characters, the two rest on a shared skeleton. “In a purely practical sense, merging the designs was relatively easy,” McLauchlan explains. “The harder part was defining a criterion or creative direction for the project: finding the why.” The six-year development window kept the question open. McLauchlan grew up in New Zealand and moved to continental Europe in 2015. It was this outsider’s vantage point that helped him to understand the ‘why’ of the project – its reason for being.

He was drawn in by the typography produced by people working far outside the design canon, like truck liveries, vinyl signage and logos assembled in a sunless office in a light industrial park off a ring-road. “There’s a brutal honesty to a truck livery,” he tells us. “It doesn’t care about the neuroses of people who can recognise Helvetica BQ in print. In this world, there’s no time or budget for pretence.

The logo needs to be drawn because the company vehicles need signage, customers are waiting, and there’s money to be made.” He frames this as common ground, the same problem-solving that occupies any designer, stripped of the airs. The three core families carry that thinking in their design. Schengen A, B and C are linked by a width axis that the user can slide along to fine-tune the output. As the characters widen, the Eurostile influence deepens: A is closest to Helvetica, while C pushes furthest towards Eurostile’s boxiness.

B sits somewhere in the middle. McLauchlan and Charsley set aside the standard approach of treating widths as mechanical variations on one drawing. “They’re as close to discrete designs as they can be while still functioning as siblings,” McLauchlan says. Each end of the spectrum was judged by its own criteria. “A needed to both worship Helvetica and subvert it. C needed to embrace Eurostile at its most extreme.

And, as is often the case with a middle child, B became the peacemaker.” All three families carry monospaced equivalents, boxier than their proportional siblings, with alternate Eurostile ‘r’ and ‘t’ glyphs leaning into science fiction. Beyond the core, the system includes three more families, each beginning from a single historical reference: Zone from Dick Jensen’s Serpentine, Line from A. M. Cassandre’s Peignot and Core from Walter Haettenschweiler’s Haettenschweiler. But none are intended as a straight-up revival. “The references are only a starting point,” McLauchlan notes.

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The article discusses a unique typographic development that merges two iconic typefaces, which is significant for brand strategy professionals looking for innovative design approaches.