Gestalten

Your name / Company name
Nik Thoenen (re-p.org) Vienna

Can you give us a brief description about you and the company you work for?
RE-P.ORG is a Vienna-based group of designers from varied disciplines, who work across a range of creative media from the web, print, art to live performances and mobile media. They work with various methods like aesthetical analysis in various media, schematizing the production mechanisms as well as conceptions of spatial politics of representation and identity, cut-and-paste that make it possible to piece together individual facts into a broader structure. It’s also getting possible to leave a typical main-medium, without having to obey any hierarchy between design, music and art. Or even to set up our priorities between all these medias.

I’m interested I functional graphic design reduced to a pragmatic language. I work mainly for cultural institution, especially in the contemporary art sector, film and architecture.

How would you characterize your design style?
My interest lies in structural order and not only in a typographical way. I was inspired from the School of Design in Biel. Designers and friends helped me understand the possibility to digitalize my own font ideas. I started with matrix fonts and later grids and module-based fonts. The development with my fonts shows an important evolution of my approach to design.

Place of work
Vienna, Austria

Can you give us a short description about your font?
'Gridnik' (foundry: originally designed by Dutch designer Wim Crouwel in the late 60s) has served as an inspiration for 'Blender'. It was created with the intention to have a rounder version of the unspectacular text font. “Blend” is a blending tool in Fontographer. The typeface is based on 2 CAD-fonts from early illustration programs which were first generated as characters and then cut with each other. A new mixed form was developed out of the constructed collection of forms.

Do you think that too many fonts exist?
Surprised and astonished about how many new and interesting fonts are being created all the time. Fonts develop further.