House worked closely with the Eames family for over ten years to gain access to some of the more obscure archive materials, to seek approval for the designs and to get a feel for what Charles and Ray would have wanted in a font family that bears their name.

“Design is a willingness to surrender to a journey,” said Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles and Ray Eames and standard bearer of the estate. “You often hear about ‘design driven’ companies, but most of them that want to license the Eames name are thinking of it as an acquisition for their collection of brands. Every once in a while you encounter a company like House Industries who is willing to go on that journey and grow our brand as well as theirs.”

The Eames Century Roman family has eight different weights, from a distinctively delicate thin to a bombastic extra black. Corresponding italics are on double duty with their subtle nod to Ray Eames’ handwriting style while also providing an accompaniment to the Roman styles. All sixteen fonts in this family include carefully-weighted small caps, nine different figure styles, ligatures, contextual alternate forms and thousands of lines of advanced OpenType code.

Keeping with the Eames philosophy of balancing form and function, House also developed a special stencil version of the heaviest weight of the text family. Rather than recreate an existing stencil design, House designers penned gently bent plywood-inspired curves to develop an adroit interaction between shapes.

Visit the Eames mini-site.