You know you're the next big thing when David Lee Roth drops by to hear you lecture about fonts and John Mayer blurts out he's a "huge fan."
Meet House Industries of Yorklyn: The rock stars of typeface.
House is the Marx Brothers to modern design's Margaret Dumont (the high-society comic foil to Groucho), according to artist Chris Cooper.
"Their intelligence, humor and sense of history seems to make every other designer look like the pompous, pretentious nerds that they no doubt are," Cooper writes in a testimonial on House's website.
Blockbuster producer J.J. Abrams, who directed "Mission: Impossible III," hired House to create the film's macho logos.
The design studio's name-dropping doesn't stop there. Major clients have included Major League Baseball, Agent Provocateur lingerie, Hermes, ESPN, MTV, Nickelodeon's TV Land, McDonald's and Pepsi. Jimmy Kimmel even commissioned a custom logo reminiscent of old Hollywood for "Jimmy Kimmel Live."
The "Survivor" logo? That's from House's kitschy "Tiki" font collection. The Build-A-Bear birth certificate is in House's "Funhouse" type. And the versatile "Neutraface," inspired by mid-century architect Richard Neutra, has graced Adele's album covers, HBO's "Girls" logo, the Academy Awards winning envelope, New Yorker magazine headlines and Dunkin' Donuts cups.
That's mucho glamour for a 10-person firm more at home with hot rods than highbrow. House's cramped offices are located upstairs from the post office in Yorklyn – not exactly an urban design mecca.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, House recently opened a small retail store next to the post office at 1151 Yorklyn Road. Once a general store, the roughly 1,000-square-foot space with a crusty pine floor is now a showroom for the eclectic typeface foundry, with rotating exhibits.
Through next month, product displays focus on holiday gift items, such as ampersand T-shirts, Kokeshi doll and koi fish puzzle blocks and an $800 Nativity scene inspired by celebrated architect and textile designer Alexander Gerard. Along the wall are a series of hand-painted panels of stark numbers, symbols and soothing repetitive patterns ($600 to $1,250 each) concocted by House designers and framed in recycled barn wood. Items are also available for purchase on the company website, www.houseind.com.
Early next year, the gallery will feature a selection of Hasami ceramics with specialized House fonts, previously only available in Japan.
Font collections continue to be House's bread and butter, achieving a cult-like following among tens of thousands of fans who subscribe to the company newsletter. Over its history, House has completed 36 collections in 550 type styles. Company leaders won't release sales figures.
Translating type to household products enhances the firm's brand identity and contributes to "aesthetic equity," according to House co-founder Rich Roat.
"Child mucus will not kill anything," he says of House's line of children's block puzzles, available at boutique toy stores like Marbles: The Brain Store in Christiana Mall.
"These are toys that parents aren't embarrassed to leave out," adds Roat's partner, Andy Cruz, father of two girls.
Usable high design – that's the House philosophy. It's true for their stamp on a $10 flour sack hand towel to a $400 Baccarat crystal glass. That same philosophy guided the early years of powerhouses like Apple and Ikea.
But unlike the modern mega firm, House is not willing to devalue its designs by slapping them on made-in-China plastic or particle board, says Roat, whose company was nominated for a National Design Award this year.
In other words, you won't see them at Target anytime soon.
House is highly selective about the companies it partners with to manufacture and distribute House-branded products, Roat says. Mid-century American pottery maker Heath Ceramics markets a collection of tiles and clocks with numbers in distinctive House fonts. The toy blocks, produced by Uncle Goose, are made with nontoxic ink and sustainable wood.
Roat and Cruz conduct exhaustive research for their font collections, occasionally crisscrossing the globe to rummage through famed designers' archives and do right by their muses. A modern font contains about 256 characters, which can take about a week to complete. But it can take another year to tweak, ensuring it's readable and appears uniform on the page.
House releases its collections, with names like "Shag," "Bad Neighborhood" and "Street Van" in gorgeous font lookbooks on textured paper with precise metallic lettering. To celebrate rock poster artist Cooper, who mocked the staff's "annoying Delaware accents," House created a collection of display typefaces.
But the company went overboard on packaging, shipping its font kit in a handmade wooden cigar box with Coop's favorite brand of stogie included for the first 400 customers. Decorated with Coop's trademark smoking devil and voluptuous nudes, the box was a miss with more conservative clients. Interestingly, Lucky Charms used one of the fonts on its cereal box.
To celebrate House's 10th anniversary, the company created a tome celebrating its subversive modern elements blended with timeless alphabet styles. A 20th anniversary book is in the works.
Given that many of House's font collections, including the Eames Century Modern, cost less than $300 and are licensed like software, are their standards too high?
"They're as high as we can afford them to be," Roat says.
Yorklyn not Brooklyn
Like a Quentin Tarantino classic, House owns cool. Not Esquire-type cool. Cool born from schlock science fiction, skater parks and punk rock shows. Staffers have included a former amateur breakdancer, missionary and Hare Krishna enthusiast.
House has that indescribable, unquantifiable ingredient X. It's not overly clever design for designers. It's not retro.
It's underground, snarky and authentic.
"You listen to some music and you like it," explains Roat, who wears all black.
It all started in 1993 when Roat, raised in Hockessin, and Cruz, raised in Elsmere, quit their day jobs at a local design studio to set up their own design firm in a spare room in Roat's apartment on Harrison Street.
Cruz, a commercial art graduate of Delcastle Technical High School, was tired of trying to convince people to print on unconventional materials like cardboard. He convinced Roat, a University of Delaware communications graduate and content guy, to join him. They had one client (i.e., not much to lose).
The pair named their company the less-than-evocative Brand Design Company Inc. (this was before branding became a verb). The bathtub doubled as storage; the space in front of the stove held a makeshift desk.
They began designing posters for Delaware arts organizations, which later infiltrated the design contest circuit.
Back then, "it was all stylistic or Helvetica," Roat grimly recalls. In the early days of using Mac computers for design work, Roat and Cruz didn't want to be at the mercy of finicky art directors and corporations consolidating their graphics departments. They wanted to create sophisticated scribble scrabble. They wanted to revolt against the mediocrity of typography.
So, they created a retail font collection arm of their company called House Industries, based on a business logo of a house they found at a print shop. They bartered computer training to get their first catalog of 10 fonts printed. It was mailed to every designer, agency and art department listed in an annual trade publication.
To appear more established than they actually were, Roat and Cruz listed the company address as the 36th floor of Harrison Street in a town where the tallest building was 20 stories.
Within two days, they received their first order from Warner Bros. Records. It was a sticky situation since they had only completed enough characters to spell out the names of their fonts.
That "General Collection," rough in quality but defiant in spirit, is still in use today. Saab picked up Rougfhuse for an ad campaign and MTV's on-air department enjoyed Crackhouse.
In 1995, the crew moved to Tatnall St. in a former Wilmington print shop with an unsightly blood stain near its entrance. They never bothered to paint the building because they knew it would get re-tagged by graffiti artists. Eventually, they sold it and moved to Yorklyn.
Early on, House would throw in a graphic T-shirt for customers who bought 10 fonts. Art department staffers used to fight over them, Roat remembers.
Later, the company launched its own clothing line, House 33, in London's Soho district. The shop lasted about a year before inter-continental quality control for varsity jackets and denim became too cumbersome. The company did have a successful run with its "bondage jeans," including zippers along the length of the back legs.
House still plans to dabble in the apparel sector, along with relaunching a glossy House magazine.
The firm redesigned the uniforms for bicycle builder Richard Sachs' cycling team down to the socks. Rather than splatter logos everywhere, sponsors were relegated to the bottom half of the back of the shirts. House's logo was prominently visible on the bicep.
In October, House worked with Japan's oldest textile company to launch a collection of slippers, wallets and cosmetic cases using House-designed patterns. The collection, available at the Japanese equivalent of department stores, was inspired by the pagodas, roof tiles and ropes found in Japanese shrines.
Drawing heavily from post-World War II pop culture, House designs have a robust following in Japan. In the U.S., customers are less discerning, Roat says. House merchandise is available in select museum shops nationwide.
While the House gang is immune to font sightings at this point – "it's very hard to go somewhere and not see Neutraface," admits Cruz – they are convinced that type still elicits a strong emotional reaction among the masses.
Even in this age of acronyms and abbreviations.
Contact Margie Fishman at (302) 324-2882 or mfishman@delaware online.com.
Recognize this House font?
? Wendy's menu: Neutraface
? Club Penguin website: Burbank
? Las Vegas logo: Las Vegas
? Survivor logo: Tiki
? Build-A-Bear logo: Funhouse
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