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The
irreverent Yorklyn, Delaware-based type foundry House Industries
established its
basic modus operandi when co-founder and art director Andy Cruz was
still in the 10th grade. A precocious artist, he had enrolled in a
commercial art program at the local technical high school alongside
friend and future partner Allen Mercer, despite having only a hazy
idea of what commercial art even meant. As part of the program,
students got to work half the day at a local studio, "which was
cool," Cruz says, "because it gave us a taste of the real world and
what a small agency had to deal with while we were trying to pass
algebra."
The studio where he worked,
Miller Mauro Group, also exposed him
to the computing revolution that was turning the design industry on
its head in the late '80s, even as he was also required to learn
traditional commercial-illustration techniques in class. One of his
jobs at Miller Mauro was to run jobs on floppy disks over to a
local service bureau run by a guy named Rich Roat. Eventually Roat
moved over to Miller Mauro to become a kind of jack-of-all-trades,
which resulted in the pair working on many projects together. "The
chemistry was there, where I'd come up with some crazy idea, and
fortunately he'd buy into it, and we'd figure out a way to pull it
off," says Cruz. Which is more or less how House Industries is
still run today.
On
how he discovered design:
I liked to draw. Skateboarding and punk rock helped me connect the
dots.
In 1993, Roat
bought into Cruz's crazy idea that the two of them
should quit their jobs to start their own business, so they set up
shop in Roat's spare bedroom and called themselves Brand Design Co.
They wanted to do wilder, more creative work that was inspired by
the subcultures through which they'd discovered graphic design in
the first place—skateboarding, heavy metal, video games, hot rods.
This was impossible within the conservative, corporate climes of
Wilmington, so they picked up the phone and started calling around
for clients.
They sweet-talked Calumet
Carton, a carton manufacturer in
Chicago, into giving them a small job, a mailing of CD
envelopes—which Cruz purposely designed to be "borderline ugly,"
much to the consternation of his client. This was the year of
Steven Heller's seminal essay "Cult of the Ugly" and the height of
postmodernism in design. The tactic worked. People noticed the
mailing and more jobs ensued, along with a first wave of press
recognition. At the same time, the fledgling company—now a trio
with the addition of Cruz's Miller Mauro buddy Allen Mercer—had
begun to realize that client work could be kind of a chore. Was
there a way for them to distill their aesthetic into a product
line?
The answer, they decided, would
come through the hand-lettered
fonts they'd begun developing—"our gateway drug," Cruz says. But
they assumed the venture would probably flop though, and since good
things had been said about Brand Design Co., they decided to come
up with a new name so as not to sully the old one. Cruz was looking
through a collection of old clip art and saw an image of a factory
next to a house. "There it is: House Industries!" he exclaimed. In
keeping with their fondness for appropriating pop-cultural
ephemera, they used the clip art itself as their logo.
On being part of Design Journeys:
Honestly, it doesn't matter if you're black, brown, white, purple
or blue. At the end of the day, good work should transcend
race.
To market the
venture, Roat traded QuarkXPress training to a
clerk at the local Sir Speedy in exchange for free printing of a
postcard that House sent out to all the addresses listed in the
back of that year's Communication Arts annual.
Unfortunately, they'd only created enough letters to spell out the
font names themselves, so when the art director of Warner Bros.
Records called to buy the fonts, they had to cite a disclaimer
they'd placed at the bottom of the mailer which said "Allow four to
six weeks for delivery," then scramble to complete the fonts. "That
was the shot in the arm," Cruz said. "I thought, wait, there might
be some interest here."
Sleepless
nights ensued, dominated by the mastering of
Fontographer and adding new styles. "I'd be lying to you if I said
that when we first started we knew anything about type," Cruz says.
"We were a bunch of kids, and by doing it, we learned the hard
way." They did learn, though, and over time, House was able to
become increasingly selective about the client work it took on. In
1995, the company released Crackhouse, a gritty, punk-zine-inspired
sans serif font created by newcomer Jeremy Dean that epitomized the
grungey aesthetic popularized by designers like David Carson and
Art Chantry. It became the cornerstone of House's General
Collection, a line of similarly distressed fonts with arch names
like Outhouse and Halfwayhouse, which helped put the company on the
map.
Around this time, Cruz's
obsession with the Southern California
hot-rod culture epitomized by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, the car builder
and illustrator famed for his grotesque Rat Fink caricatures, and
was spending all his extra money on Rat Fink models, iron-ons,
decals and other ephemera. "It hit me one day," he says. "Why not
have my hobby work for me?" In 1996, Cruz's revelation led to a
licensed collaboration with Roth that yielded his Rat Fink font, a
translation of Roth's hand-lettered type into the digital realm.
While House had already been emulating its design inspirations with
fonts like Crackhouse or Monster, a tribute to B-movie title
sequences, it now began making homages to its heroes as a conscious
strategy, following up Rat Fink with Coop, a tribute to rock-poster
artist Chris Cooper, in 1998.
His
advice to young designers:
Do work that will make you happy. Though happiness doesn't often
pay as well, sometimes it's a little more important than cash. You
can always go get a better-paying job that you'd hate.
As Cruz and crew aged, however, those
heroes got more grown-up.
Over the last decade, House has released fonts inspired by the work
of typographer Ed Benguiat, textile designer Alexander Girard and
architect Richard Neutra. "It comes back to our personal interests
and hobbies," Cruz says. "When my wife and I first found out we
were pregnant and had to buy furniture, we thought, 'Let's not buy
lame furniture.' That's how we were introduced to Neutra, Eames and
modernism."
The fonts have also
increasingly become centerpieces of playful
product spheres built around a given theme. For example, House
created a nativity set based on a Girard illustration and a set of
wooden blocks displaying the letters of the Neutraface Slab font.
These accessories and prints are a natural outgrowth of the quirky,
elaborate packaging House has always wrapped its font CDs in. (The
company does also release its fonts naked, via digital download.)
"The type is great," says Cruz. "It's our core business. But it's a
really nice distraction to take those letterforms and see how far
we can push them."
There will be
another block set and several other associated
projects to accompany the Eames collection, which Cruz says will be
a large family that hearkens back to the wood-blocky slab-serif
typefaces such as Clarendon. Released in May 2010 after a decade of
development, it will likely be the last of House's collaborations.
"Where do you go after the Eameses?" Cruz asks.
If the past is any indication, it's likely
to be some new hobby
or beloved pop-culture reference, and the result is sure to further
cement House's reputation as a group of pranksters who take their
type seriously. Cruz says not to count on future influences
remaining so civilized, either. "As much as we like all that
serious stuff, we also like to just go off and have fun. If that
means drawing hair and tongues on type, great!"
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