Part foundry, part creative cultural collective, House Industries has always gone beyond just font designs in their enterprises. In the past decade, they have found inspiration from the work of some of the best mid-century modern designers—Ed Benguiat, Richard Neutra, Alexander Girard. Both honoring and renewing the parts of the past that still have resonance for the present, these projects have been hugely successful not just in the resulting type designs like Neutraface, but also in their nontraditional design “objects”—toys, furniture or decorative pieces for which House builds upon the themes and sometimes rediscovered sketches and ephemera from their muses to reinvent rather than recycle or reissue designs from the past.

House has continued this string of outstanding product launches with their new typeface Eames Century Modern, an extended font family that celebrates and complements the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames. Accompanying the typeface are a whimsical set of blocks based on the 1949 Eames House (one of the experimental Case Study Houses); a series of serigraphs inspired by the wire-like letterforms Ray created for an Arts & Architecture cover; a set of tiles from Heath Ceramics featuring characters from a variety of typefaces (Edith Heath having been another major figure of mid-century modern design); and other objects that evoke the Eames aesthetic.

Eames Century Modern was a long time in planning. When House released Neutraface in 2002, the people in charge of the Girard estate were so impressed that talks soon began for what ultimately led to House’s Girard project, finished in early 2009. Because Alexander Girard had worked closely with the Eameses, it was a natural progression for the Eames family to trust that a partnership with House would also respect the integrity of Charles and Ray’s work. Although House had approached grandson Eames Demetrios three years earlier, now the collaboration with the family, who are justifiably cautious about licensing anything with the Eames name, got serious. “Eames Demetrios really did not want to rehash handwriting or something trite and cliché,” says House co-founder Rich Roat. “He preferred that we take all of the pieces and engineer something that Charles and Ray would have done if they were type designers today. That meant the typeface had to be beautiful and functional—and not so overpowering that it overshadowed its surroundings.” House soon tapped Dutch type designer Erik van Blokland to join in. “When I mentioned to my friend Erik that we were negotiating a license with the Eameses, he told me that he wanted to be involved in any way, shape or form,” says Roat. “We have a ton of respect for him as a creative mind and as a type designer.”

The creative process began with Roat, Andy Cruz, Ken Barber and others on the House team along with van Blokland diving into exhaustive design archeology. “Ray and Charles Eames did not design a typeface,” says van Blokland. “But in their work they left a clear brief of what it would have to be and that proved an irresistible challenge. The way they used type in their work, not only in graphic design and illustration, but also the exhibitions and movies, the wide range of applications and media, gave us a clear framework. We finally started for real in 2007. We had collected a lot of reference material and, by then, had a clear idea on direction. Further research was undertaken at the Eames Office archive, the Vitra archive in Basel and the Library of Congress in DC. Going through the archives, it was impossible to miss their love for ornament and detail. While their furniture designs search for a kind of pure and efficient shape, in other projects such as movies and illustrations, they compensate for some of that by using playful and colorful details. These things found their way into the project.”

Cruz sketched some examples of what a Century-inspired Eames typeface might look like and van Blokland put together a few rough character sets. “The typeface was going to have lots of weights. Referring to the rich typographic tradition of Victorian printing, these weights would be different. The typeface would have playful components, but it would also need to have very practical styles, capable of complex typography, representing scientific data and to explain and teach.”