October, an industrial rounded typeface

October is a warmer version of November. While November is a rational, utilitarian typeface inspired by street signage, October has a different relationship to its industrial past. Its round letter terminals were created by the rotary cutters of a CNC router. Changing the size of the cutters changed the stroke widths of the letterforms.

Starting with simple, monolinear skeletons of November’s various weights, we used the router to engrave the letters in a block of wood, experimenting with the sizes of the letters and the milling cutters. The results were optically corrected to create a functional digital font family that works at a variety of medium to large text sizes.

October emanates the same no-frills, no-nonsense attitude as November, but its rounded stroke endings lend it a friendlier character useful for signage, branding, headlines and even editorial purposes. It is available in three logical widths (Normal, Condensed, Compressed), and three writing scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek). Hebrew and Arabic are under development and will follow shortly.

Illustrations by Shiva Nallaperumal