GD Octio

I always relish the challenge of designing monospace fonts. Making the naturally wide and narrow characters fit the same amount of horizontal space requires a type designer to carefully consider how to use that space so that the letters won't feel either cramped or stretched out.

One approach is to flatten the curves. A horizontal line doesn’t feel squished or extended in the way that a curve would.

This is what we did in GD Octio. And then we went one step further and flattened the corners into straight 45° lines. So the shape of an ‘o’ becomes octagonal — hence the name.

This has another benefit when rendering the font on screen: the hinting algorithms love this simple octagonal shape, because it’s so easy to fit on a pixel grid. So you get crisp and clear rendering even in small sizes on screen.

The octagonal shapes lend GD Octio a rather techy appearance, reminiscent of some classic monospace fonts like OCR A, which served as a reference point during our design process. Such fonts are often designed with an engineer’s mindset, and that’s what give them their particular flavor as well as their flaws. With GD Octio, I strived to bring out that character while also paying attention to balance and rhythm. In other words, to marry an engineer’s mindset with a designer’s eye.

GD Octio is sold at GD Foundry.