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Your name / Company name
Timo Gaessner, 123buero

Can you give us a brief description about yourself and the company you work for?
I am consulting, developing and realizing contemporary projects in various disciplines including print, interactive and environmental design. The people I am mainly working with come from a cultural background.

How would you characterize your design style?
Actually, I try to avoid a certain, repetitive "style". My work is often based on typographical solutions.

Place of work
Berlin, Germany

Can you give us a short description about your font?
”naiv” is a grotesk rounded font with script elements available in both script and text versions in every weight.

Why did you design this font and what was your inspiration?
Back in 2001, I was asked to design the Paris-based magazine Balcony (I did 14 issues in total). My design concept was to use classical book printing elements for navigation. In addition, I had to develop a logo that would fit to those elements, but using a simple script font would have been too boring, so I started making one stroke sketches of a naive handwriting based on a grid. I ended up with a pixilated solution for the logo and the book printing elements and then everything came together easily. After I stopped working for Balcony, I remembered those sketches and start doing ”naiv”.

What is the ideal usage of your font?
Texts and displays, and wherever it makes sense.

How did you come up with the name of the font?
The script elements give a slight ornamental character to the font and the rounded ends support that script feeling. In developing this font, I researched and looked at practice handwriting books for children. The handwriting of kids seemed somehow natural, unaffected and ”naiv” to me.

Do you think that too many fonts exist?
No way! There are still millions of font designs to do.

Your future plans?
Keep learning. Enjoy the upcoming summer and visit Alex in Zürich.