It started when Jorge Iván’s cousin gifted him a page from the 1978 Manual de Caligrafía, featuring display faces like Astra, Good Vibrations, Piccadilly and, most presciently, Stripes.
Letraset released Tony Wenmann’s multilinear typeface Stripes in 1972—and in Iván’s opinion, no one has produced a worthy revival in the years since.
Entranced by the typeface—“whose peculiarity and innovation lies in the fact that it has alternate versions for most alphabetic characters, allowing them to join with each other, creating a continuous succession of shared parts along the words one wants to give shape to,” as Iván writes—he set out to make that revival.
After pouring over catalog specimens and real-world applications, Iván added the necessary glyphs and characters to modernize the face—including an entire lowercase alphabet—manually drew endless Bezier curves, and emerged with Octothorpe, the latest release by the Argentina-based Pampatype.
Octothorpe features contextual alternates that allow users to decide whether or not to link words; extenders; swashes; extensive diacritic coverage; a currency suite; and some bonus icons to boot.
Hypnotic, colorful and character-driven—and sometimes at play on the border of legibility—you can find it all in action at Pampatype’s delightful Octothorpe microsite here.
