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 design collective consisting of Maia Gusberti and myself.
Graphic design is communication design and service and we find our conceptual and creative challenge in using as few resources as possible to achieve maximum distinctiveness, thriving to balance the technical possibilities as well as the reduction we are striving to realize. The primary design approach is typographical, down to font development. We work in an evolutionary way, and collectively. Our current commissions are all in the cultural field, particularly for contemporary art institutions.

Place of work
Vienna, Austria

Can you give us a short description about your font?
The font is based on a rational approach following logical principles, and built on grid systems, yet they contain an emotional, human element.

I first designed Blender, which was released under the dgv Font Label in 2003. The design was heavily influenced by the 'Gridnik' font (*Foundry, originally drawn by the Dutch designer Wim Crouwel in the late 60s; he called it 'the thinking man's Courier') and the intention was to create a font that served as a less spectacular headline and text font featuring a curved face.

Since it’s original release, I have worked on developing Blender and expanded it’s range of Roman characters from 254 to 377 glyphs. It now includes all codes and sets for the Nordic and Slavic languages from Czech to Polish as well as Romanian, Hungarian, Finnish and Turkish.

Expanding a character set has been sheer hard work in calculating the additional characters appropriately so that they fit in with the rest of the font.

*About the font designer Wim Crouwel
He is one of the Netherlands' greatest designers, noted for his systematic approach to typography and creative handling of letter shapes. His innovative work dates back to the late 1950s and 1960s and includes the development of several typefaces that are now available internationally in digital forms: the New Alphabet, the Fodor and Stedelijk Museum alphabets, and the Gridnik family of letters. He described Gridnik, designed and extended by Foundry, as 'the thinking man's Courier'; it was one of the orientation points in the development of the 'Blender' typeface.


What is the ideal usage of your font?
It was always intended to work in volume settings, but the way it is formulated means that it counts as a headline font with the potential for extended use.

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.