TT Octosquares is a fresh, revised, expanded, and significantly improved version of our first commercial typeface TT Squares and its narrow version TT Squares Condensed. With all our love for the original font family, it felt there was a lack of functionality, character composition, features, and design freshness, which prompted us to the idea of a complete restart. Now TT Octosquares can be safely called a superfamily consisting of 4 widths (Compressed, Condensed, Standard, Expanded), 72 faces (18 in each width), and 1 incredible variable font in which variability works jointly on three axes.
In addition to working on the contours themselves and their design, we completely revised the composition of the typeface. First, we added two completely new widths: Compressed and Expanded. Secondly, we increased the number of weights in each of the subfamilies—while in the old versions there were 5 weights, now in each of the subfamilies there are 9 weights. At the stage of working with the contours of characters, we revised the roundings, changed the forms of shoulder and stem crossings, added noticeable shelves at the letters, removed the sharpness from the triangular characters and cut off all sharp endings.
From the very beginning of work on TT Octosquares, we planned to make a variable 3-axis version of it sewn into 1 font file. This means that by installing just one variable font file, you get access to three axial adjustment of the font: by thickness, width and inclination. Thanks to this flexibility in settings, you can always choose a custom combination of thickness, width or inclination that best suits your tasks.
Due to the increased language support and the appearance of a bunch of useful OpenType features, the number of glyphs in the typeface has increased from 480 to 825 in each style. Now you can use stylistic alternates, standard and discretionary ligatures, or use old-style figures, numbers in circles and even slashed zeros in your design. Full list of features: aalt, mark, mkmk, ccmp, subs, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, frac, ordn, lnum, pnum, tnum, onum, case, zero, dlig, liga, salt, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10, ss11, ss12, calt, locl.
To use the variable font with three variable axes on Mac you will need MacOS 10.14 or higher. For other software and browsers, you can check the support status here: v-fonts.com/support/.