DIA about turning the typography the wrong way up
Meg Donohoe and Mitch Paone, co-founders of influential design company DIA, talk about why process should come before aesthetics and how using motion design in their work felt radical at the beginning
DIA was founded in 2008 and is a design agency with a “relentless pursuit of quality”, where process, thinking and strategy come before aesthetic decisions or success. DIA specializes in "kinetic identities and typographic systems," and while it might be pretty typical now to mix motion design with branding when the studio started, no one else really cared about type and brand communication that way.
In this way, the studio pioneered ways of using motion design that went beyond gimmicks and anomalies. Instead, fonts were used to breathe life into identities and truly embody a brand.
“Most of the brand communication is digital now. A company's Instagram feed is just as important as buying OOH media. So it was important for us to rethink our creative process in creating a brand identity, ”explains co-founder Mitch Paone. “Technological advances in brand communication require us to learn or develop new techniques. It was very logical to transform our traditional understanding of typography into these new worlds. "
Since text and typography are the most important parts of a visual identity, this was the first area Paone and his co-founder Meg Donohoe explored and experimented with in this new context. “What has become so exciting about all of this is that we are essentially writing a new chapter in design history,” reflects Paone. “We were trained in fixed formats and grids, but now we work in rooms that are completely immersive, like AR and VR, with no restrictions. How typography works and behaves in these environments is a brave new world. "