Commercial Type Design Studio

If you take a fresh look at our top navigation menu, you might notice a new page: Design. The Commercial Type Design Studio, led by Dino Sanchez, quietly launched in 2019 as a project of Commercial Type and, since then, has been hard at work creating logos, design strategies, and visual identity systems with a pronounced typographic orientation. 

Commercial Type is globally recognized for its retail type families and for custom type, logotypes, and lettering commissioned by corporate, editorial, and cultural clients. Opening a design studio within Commercial Type made a lot of sense to us: As a foundry, we’ve always shuttled between a deep passion for type history and a desire to see how a new typeface could operate in a hypothetical layout. It’s a speculative game of imagination, a process of reverse engineering something that doesn’t yet exist. 

Druk perfectly exemplifies this approach. Firmly rooted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century sans serifs, it sampled a constellation of typographic references—Willem Sandberg’s work for the Stedelijk Museum, Barbara Kruger’s supergraphic installations, tight-not-touching headline typography from the sixties and seventies, DIY uses of Letraset in underground zines—to arrive at a typeface that we thought would perform well in a fictive present-day layout. Bloomberg Businessweek proved the ideal real-world use case. 

It dawned on us that since we were already creating typefaces by reverse engineering imagined contexts, we could also just go ahead and design the contexts. If fonts are the theory, typography is the practice. We view type as the bedrock of visual design, which revolves around words—type is the clothes words wear. Visual design starts there. Our firm grounding in type makes us uniquely poised to understand how brands can use words to productively collude with the visual elements—images, colors, patterns—that support them.

The Design Studio’s new home on the Commercial Type website is an ongoing repository of selected projects and design notes. A longtime collaborator with Christian Schwartz, Dino Sanchez works in brand identities, objects, and space. He began his career as an industrial designer, which led him to Birsel + Seck, and then to the global design firm frog. There, he carved out a niche for himself at the intersection of brand, strategy, and user experience, leading the industrial and brand experience design groups in frog’s New York office. In 2015 he joined the interior design and hospitality firm AvroKO, where he established and led Brand Bureau, the company’s brand division. Later, he served as the executive design director of Droga5, where he expanded the agency’s design offerings across its brand, user experience, and digital departments. He looks forward to continuing this multidisciplinary work both in partnership with external design studios and as the director of an autonomous, holistic visual identity laboratory within Commercial Type.