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House Industries
House Industries formed in the cultural vacuum of the early '90s when corporate excess and a digital euphoria left letterers, illustrators and production designers fired, retired, retrained or reassigned. Graphic design had become an elitist profession where many practitioners saw themselves more as artists than tradespeople. Unfortunately, the talented journeymen on whom they depended saw their profession suffer a perceived obsolescence from the notion that software and computers could replace their skill, experience and muscle memory. This void left an opportunity for Andy Cruz and I.
Andy had lifetime of influence from his meticulous professional hot-roddding father and a vocational technical high school instructor who insisted on drilling the basics before letting kids into the Mac lab. I had a somewhat useful college degree in communications, a largish apartment with a liberal landlord and a Tourettic middle finger that prevented me from keeping any sort of long term employment. We found ourselves working together at a small Wilmington design firm, got hired away by a software company and subsequently picked up our first design client, a South Chicago carton manufacturer with lots of patience and a willingness to give us the keys to their production facility. We quit our jobs, took a vow of poverty and named our new outfit Brand Design Co., Inc.
While clients and print sales reps wanted to go out to three hour lunches, Andy and I preferred to hang back with the press operators to learn the intricate lithographic relationship between ink, pressure, speed and paper. We first made our bones on an international stage with a deep mixing bowl of cultural clues and cultivated relationships with the people who actually ran the machines that produced our work. Our early projects stood out because we were willing to dig deeper, stay poorer and draw more while most of our contemporaries were content to contain their influences and results within the digital confines of a cathode ray tube and the narrow minds of their clients.
Early in 1994, Andy and I found ourselves staring at each other wondering where our next paycheck was coming from when we decided we needed a paper company as a client. Lots of our contemporaries were socking away six figure retainers extolling the virtues of countless white hues with incredibly self-serving promotions, so we wanted in on the gravy train. We figured the best place was to start at the bottom, so we dug out the ugliest paper swatchbook we could find and cold called the company's marketing director. By some stroke of luck he picked up the phone, had recently lived in Delaware and was in a generous enough mood to throw us a bone. The name of the company was Custom Papers Group, and their highest profile product was a leatherette-embossed sheet used as the cover of the M-16 manual.
Andy's talented vo-tech classmate Allen Mercer, who had delayed his entry into the real world by matriculating at a prestigious art school, foolishly turned down several lucrative job offers to join us as a partner (partner is defined as someone who works really hard but does not collect a paycheck). Still not over his BFA brainwashing, Allen lectured us on the importance of a well developed concept before starting work on a new project, which in this case was "Custom Papers = Custom Cars + Custom Lettering." This low brow approach took our heads out of the mercurial world of graphic design and forced us to look elsewhere for ideas, mostly from Andy's dad's collection of pre-digital era car magazines and 1/25th scale model kits. At first we were just looking for automotive influence, but what we found was a poignant reminder that professionally drawn display lettering made even the most mundane editorial pieces and advertisements look so much cooler. We fed the obsolete notions of hand-drawn headlines, traditional commercial art techniques, elbow grease, graphite, india ink and vellum into our inspirational sausage blender and out came the distinctly illustrative layered lithographic layouts that defined our Custom Papers Group promotions. This extensive research and development phase would later bear fruit as fodder for our elaborate theme-based font collections.
Andy and I did not much like working for clients. They imposed deadlines, wanted a say in the visual composition of their final product (imagine that) and dangled just enough money to keep us hunting for the next hustle. Hence the need for independent recurring income. Since we had drawn several custom alphabets for various clients, we thought we would try to develop some digital fonts and sell them to unsuspecting customers. We did not want the almost certain failure of this new venture to reflect negatively on our semi-successful design company, so we cooked up the name House Industries and cobbled together a logo from a printer's clip art sheet. Our amazing new product was a collection of ten display "fonts" based on lettering for our growing portfolio of commercial design projects. We bummed free paper from Custom Papers Group, traded Quark Express training at the local print shop and created our first font promotion. Andy's little brother Adam came over every day after school and typed in the names and addresses of those who appeared in the 1993 Communication Arts Design Annual. We printed out labels, slapped on stamps, dropped a bag at the post office and lamented about the good paper we'd just wasted.
The art director from Warner Brothers Records called a few days later: "These fonts are great! Can you Fedex a disk right away?" Andy pushed the hold button, handed me the receiver and asked "What do we do?" The problem was we had only drawn enough letters to spell out the name of each font. I picked up the phone and said something like "Well, if you read the small print on the back of the mailer you'll see that you need to allow four to six weeks for delivery sorry about that could you spell your name please." Fortunately she had a good sense of humor and became customer number one while we taught ourselves Fontographer and accounted for the countless permutations one must consider when designing working typeface.
All of those things happened in a relatively short period of time about 18 years ago, but those events formed the basis of how House Industries operates today. Any profit from that first font collection was reinvested in making more fonts, hiring people whose alphabetic aptitude exceeded our own and creating complex marketing promotional tactics. Things haven't changed much. A bleary eyed Andy Cruz just walked into the studio after spending 30 straight hours bro-ing down with press operators, sniffing ink and paper dust while babysitting every form of our new 100-page catalog. And we're investing most of our current sweat equity and spare change in photolettering.com, which is an untried and untested populist online application offering well-formed semi-custom lettering accessible to anyone with an internet connection and seven bucks.
Good design, carefully-engineered typography and professionally-drawn lettering are not going to save the world. We are, however, products of our environment, and much of our man-made cultural commercial landscape has become exceedingly ugly. Look around and you'll see that Mike Judge's Idiocracy (released in 2006) has become oddly prophetic in that our collective conscience has been traded on the stock market in exchange for short term capital gains and long-term visual blight. I'd like to think that House Industries has at least a slowing effect on this trend.
Thanks for reading.
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Originally Posted by hampco
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