Octavio Pardo is a Graphic designer specialized in type design. In 2010, he graduated with an MA in Type Design from the University of Reading. Since then, he has worked with some of the best designers and studios in the world, like Type-Together, Tobias Frere-Jones, Jean François Porchez, Leftloft or Sharp Type. He also worked as a consultant for Google Fonts and as a visiting professor at the University of Gjøvik, Norway.

His work has been recognized among others by the Type Directors Club, Communication Arts, the Granshan Award, or the Laus Award. Octavio Pardo has lectured all around the world, including venues like the Media Lab of the MIT, the La Salle School of Design in Singapore, or the Harrington College of Design in Chicago. He is currently finishing his PhD at the Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation of Copenhagen on the subject of legibility for low vision people.

Nowadays, due to the increase in life expectancy, the problem of low vision is enormous. Impairments like glaucoma, myopia, or macular degeneration are at pandemic levels. How can we design adapted fonts for these individuals? In this presentation I will introduce a new method developed during my PhD consisting of two elements: First, an ultra-flexible variable font, built over a new paradigm of typographic analysis, which denies the value of traditional variables (weight, width, contrast...) and puts the focus on our visual system and our ability to perceive information distribution in space. Second, a self-learning Bayesian algorithm that measures the participant's reading speed and governs the variation inside the font space seeking the configurations with the highest speed.