House Industries Goes Gaga for Girard
House Industries recently made a mark with their heavy ampersand. Now they’ve turned their typographic attentions to a different kind of design icon. Their new Girard Collection celebrates the work of Alexander Girard, stalwart Herman Miller star whose patterns and textiles imbued the basic fabric of mid-century modernism with a spirited aesthetic and unprecedented burst of color.
The renowned font foundry has rendered Girard's work in painstaking detail, and they have certainly done their homework to ensure that nothing was lost in translation. Inspiration for the line came from a variety of unique source material, from the nativity set designed from a Girard illustration hanging in his son’s home to the puzzle from an unused-but-certainly-not-unloved carpet design in the project archive of Eero Saarinen's Miller House in Colombus, Indiana. The Memory Game and Marilyn Neuhart dolls will give your little ones an early primer on good design (it's never too early to talk to your kids about Modernism, folks). And whether Slab, Script, Air, or Sansusie, House Industries has taken Girard's lettering and created a super sweet suite of fonts, so you too can make like Alexander the Great.
I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Girard, as I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to thumb through some of the original textiles at the Herman Miller archives in Michigan, and I’m really loving these bright designs that celebrate the beautiful union of the personal "craft" style with the more polished sense of design.
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Rawr! What a marriage, Girard and House. You're right, both know how to blend personal craft with design so that things don't get too hokey/homely or too slick/soulless.
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