The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Knockout vs DIN
Two hard-working sans-serifs from opposite traditions. Knockout is Jonathan Hoefler's 32-style take on 19th-century American wood type and the headline gothics it inspired, while DIN descends from a 1931 German engineering standard for signage and technical drawings, later refined into commercial families such as FF DIN and DIN Next.
Knockout is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Oswald, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Knockout → DIN is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Barlow, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to DIN →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Knockout comes in nine separately drawn widths named after boxing weight classes, from Flyweight to Sumo, so a headline of any length can be filled without squeezing letters.
- DIN 1451 was drawn on a coarse grid with compass and ruler for reproducibility on road signs and blueprints, which gives every DIN revival its square dots, straight-legged R and plain, monoline construction.
- Knockout is a flat-sided American gothic with no italics, built for editorial display; FF DIN (Albert-Jan Pool, 1995) ships five weights in normal and condensed widths with matching obliques and a rounded variant.
- Both are paid fonts: Knockout is licensed only through Hoefler & Co in separate desktop, web and app tiers, and FF DIN and DIN Next are sold by Monotype, though the original DIN 1451 design is out of copyright and has free open-licence digitisations.
Knockout
Reach for Knockout when you need punchy, compact headlines with precise width control, as in magazines, sports media, posters and packaging, and the licence fee fits the budget.
DIN
Reach for DIN when you want an engineered, no-nonsense voice for wayfinding, technical or product branding, and a family with real text weights and obliques.