The dry transfer format was a very thin bridge between the last analog technologies of type design, setting and distribution, and the digital world. In this tale of two typefaces: Letraset Stripes, a multiline geometric typeface designed by Tony Wenman in 1972 for the exclusive Letragraphica collection, and Octothorpe, a digital revival published by PampaType Font Foundry, where we rediscovered it's hidden qualities and unexplored potential, looking at early samples of use and extending its character set to giving it a second life. We'll take a look at the reanimation process, the development of a full OpenType contextual feature along with a complete set of contextual swashes for the latin script. Then we'll explore the challenges of designing diacritics and basic sets for cyrillic and greek, with the addition of a lowercase for the three scripts. We'll also explore the next possibilities for taking it to a next level, giving it an hypnotic animated effect playing with its eight lines, subtracting and combining them to honor the original vision of almost 50 years ago.
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