DIN

The German standard lettering for road signs, rail and engineering drawings. Designers adopted it in the 1990s for exactly that bureaucratic, drawn-by-committee plainness.

Designer
Deutsches Institut für Normung
Year
1931
Where
Germany
Free stand-in
Archivo
In the library
4 styles
Download Archivo, freeGoogle FontsDIN itself is licensed. Archivo is the closest free face, free for personal and commercial work under the Open Font License.

01Set it yourself

Set in ArchivoLoading the face
Tryor click the specimen and type your own.
Weight
Case
Dress it in a style

02Put it to work

Your words from the specimen, set in Archivo in the formats a project actually needs, in the colours you picked above.

yourstudio.com
DINWorkAboutContact
DIN

We design identities, websites and campaigns for people who care how things feel. This is the paragraph your headline sits on, set in Inter.

Start a project →

Tip. Headline in Archivo, standing in for DIN, body copy in Inter. Copy the CSS from the specimen above and the headline is ready to paste into your site.

03Every character

AU+0041 · Archivo 700
72pxDIN
48pxDIN
32pxDIN
20pxThe quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, 1234567890.
14pxThe quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, 1234567890.

04The free stand-in: Archivo

Why Archivo. Engineering-drawn condensed forms; Archivo carries the same industrial neutrality. DIN itself is a licensed typeface, so everything on this page is set in Archivo, which is free to use on the web and in print.

Archivo, on its own. A grotesque drawn for interface work, slightly squared. Holds up at caption size and at billboard size.

If DIN is installed on your computer, an A/B key appears in the specimen above so you can compare the two.

Download Archivo, freeGoogle Fonts

05The styles built on DIN

Brutalist ArchitectureOpen the style →Industrial ArchitectureOpen the style →Bowellism (High-Tech)Open the style →MetabolismOpen the style →

06What it pairs with

Retro FuturistRighteousSet in Archivo underneath: the body copy a headline in Righteous needs to sit on.Try it in the type lab →Stencil UtilitySaira Stencil OneSet in Archivo underneath: the body copy a headline in Saira Stencil One needs to sit on.Try it in the type lab →

07More sans faces

Helvetica22Futura14Univers9Inter7Circular6Akzidenz-Grotesk5Gill Sans5Arial4Frutiger3Graphik3Avant Garde1Chicago1Comic Sans1Universal Typeface1
Every classic face in the libraryAll fonts and pairings →
Open the type lab →Browse the styles →