Octovetica (O.5 Beta) (N9, Guillaume-Ulrich Chifflot)

Octovetica (O.5 Beta) is another experimental type from the experimental booth!
Octovetica started as an experimentations about a key aspect of computer typography : rasterization.
Letters within a type are usually drawn with continuous shapes and curves. But to be shown on-screen, which only has small discreet squarrred dots to built images with, the curves are rasterized, that is transformed into a series of dots that optically simulates the curves. So if you look closely at an Helvetica on a computer screen, you see a very different face, specifically calculated to cheat your eyes, making them believe it is an Helvetica. An impostor !

We found this paradox very stimulating and wanted to find a way to make it "striking". So we created this Octovetica family that exploits this paradox the exact opposite way : it is a square-shaped type family, that has been specifically designed to looks curved when used on screen at small sizes : at large size it looks squarred, and at small size it gets curved ! And the great thing is that this "mutating" type ended up being a very modern and versatile type !

And even, beyond this curve/square matter it also shows how this rasterizing is linked to the emerging of Mixed serifs (type that have letters with serifs, and some others without : while creating Octovetica, we saw that, in order to get a sans serif shape on screen, the letter sometime HAS TO feature some serif at its end (capital A is a clear example of that).

This advance beta release has all letters and signs, but is unkerned. Watch out for the commercial release, with more variants and complete kerning and spacing!