United
House Industries commissioned me to develop the United family as an homage to stereotypical U.S. Military lettering styles. House had obtained a set of old military lettering diagrams. It didn’t show much – only a set of quirky uppercase letters and numbers.
I started with these forms as the basis for the family, but I quickly scrapped it. The letterforms were too odd to form a suitable foundation for a functional typeface family. I restarted with the idea of a typeface with the salient characteristics from the specification: straight lines, hard edges, tough letterforms. After experimentation, I decided that the family’s internal structure should follow the traditional American gothic form and it should lightly reference classic American wood type.
This gave me a solid, “All American” foundation to build on. Before long, the family grew to epic proportions. I designed United to never leave a graphic designer wanting more from the family. It has a sans serif style, a serif style, an italic style, a condensed width, a semi-condensed width, a regular width, a semi-extended width, an extended width, a thin weight, a light weight, a medium weight, a bold weight, a heavy weight, a black weight and a stencil weight. In other words, it has just about everything a designer could ever need.
United has become quite popular since its release and it has been seen just about everywhere from NFL coverage on FOX to the New York Times editorial page.
You can order United from House Industries.
Commissioned Work
