Developed with Dalton Maag, Tephra is a new font family based on the lower-case typeface designed by 8vo in 1994, for interact, a special issue of the American Center for Design Journal and later used for the 1997 Flux New Music Festival poster series.
Previously unavailable commercially, the original type has been extended and updated to include full upper- and lower-case character sets, numerals, punctuation and European accents. Available in OpenType Format, as a family of six fonts – solid and five related outline versions – Tephra is due for release by Dalton Maag on January 15th, 2008.
‘On the outside’ surveys 8vo’s work from 1984–2001, including Octavo, the international journal of typography and its influence in the emergent typographically-led design movement in the UK and internationally during the late 1980s and through the 1990s. The emphasis is on process: trying to reveal how 8vo’s design got made rather than simply showing finished jobs. A number of hand-made and computer generated stage by stage mock-ups are featured. Written and designed by Mark Holt and Hamish Muir, two of the founding principals of 8vo, the story’s told how it was – the everyday struggles of working with clients, typesetters, printers, and later on computers. Like many of their contemporaries, 8vo were working during a period of considerable change within the design industry – the book places 8vo’s work within the context of this revolution; from paste-up to desktop.