United Typeface

House Industries had been kicking around the idea of “military fonts” as a GI Joe homage for several years before I took on the project. We initially tried to make a faithful recreation of the letters depicted in old US military lettering guidelines, but I quickly departed from that idea. I wanted something cleaner and less niche. I also secretly wanted to shift the concept from a GI Joe homage to a deadpan critique of the excessive jingoism running through American culture at the time. (This was the time of Freedom Fries and civilian Hummers.) I built the family atop classic American wood type shapes, which themselves are firmly established as a core part of the generic American brand. I added as much stuff as I could to make the whole thing as over the top as possible. The result was the largest typeface family by an American type foundry. It had 105 styles covering sans serif, serif and italic, a huge weight range and many widths. House released United in 2006 and it immediately escaped all of my lofty concepts and became ubiquitous across American sports graphics and brands that wanted to look “tough” or “All American.” As of this writing, almost 20 years after I started what would become United, the typeface is inescapable. It has been fascinating to watch.