Octave Display

Octave is a revival of an elzevir-style typeface originally designed by Théophile Beaudoire. French Elzevir types, also known as French Old Style types, started in 1846 with Louis Perrin’s cut of the Lyons capitals, a roman titling font. A few years later in 1858, Théophile Beaudoire, sous-directeur of the Fonderie Générale in Paris, transformed the idea of the Lyons capitals into a complete Oldstyle typeface (his Elzévir, named after the Dutch Renaissance printers Elsevier) to enormous success. Elzevirs, or French Oldstyle typefaces were subsquently widely reproduced by type foundries all over the world.

Our revival is based on a cut of Beaudoire’s Elzevir used in a book titled, Histoire de La Musique en Russie by Albert Soubies 1898, and remains fairly faithful to the source material with optical adjustments and improvements made during the digital drawing process. The typeface features a translation-style contrast, meaning the thicks and thins of the letters are largely decided by how a calligraphic broad-nibbed pen would create those letters. Small serifs and heavy-feeling bowls in letterforms give the typeface a cool elegance.

Octave was born from a book about music (hence the name), and features several musical emojis and symbols as an homage to the source material and also to Théophile Beaudoire, who was not only a typographer working in with the latin alphabet but who also engraved punches for musical typography. After spending more time with these letterforms, we also added a series of small caps, and small display caps that are accesible via an OpenType feature that allow for interesting and expressive ligatures and rhythmic typographic compositions that feel like little pieces of typographical music.