I launched Octin on October 16, 2007. At the time, there were only a few octagonal sports fonts available, and none of them offered a consistent range of weights with both serif and sans serif options. I decided to build a broader family and also introduced textured versions, which were unusual in that genre then. From the start, Octin included all six variants: Sports, College, Prison, Stencil, Vintage, and Spraypaint. The textures for Spraypaint and Vintage were part of the initial release; in fact, the Vintage styles were based on a scanned T-shirt texture.

Each variant was released with one free style, while the rest were sold commercially. That model helped the family gain attention, and I often saw the free versions on protest signs. Octin also found its way into professional projects: Octin Stencil appeared in the exhibition Comeback Season: Sports After 9/11 at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Octin College was used in Maximilien Binard’s book A Donkey’s Tale, and Octin Vintage showed up on Steamworks beer labels and in Wachusett Brewing Company’s 2024 rebrand.

I updated the family on June 18, 2021, removing deprecated characters such as L with dot and E with breve, and replacing reversed quotation marks with proper ones. On November 17, 2024, version 1.3 reorganized the weight naming system across College, Prison, Sports, and Stencil (Book became Light, Light was renamed Extra-Light). That update also added the section (§) symbol to all six variants. Despite more competition in the years since, Octin remains a reliable part of my catalog because of its range and versatility.