Here in the USA streets can be quite long, and house­num­bers often run into five dig­its. The choice of num­bers for this pur­pose, how­ever, is pretty lim­ited. What you see attached to most walls would not pass for pro­fes­sion­ally designed fig­ures. This is how Rob Forbes, the founder of Design within Reach, also saw it. So he asked me whether I could do any­thing about that and design num­bers that would work in three dimen­sions. An inter­view between Rob and myself is at The Type that wouldn’t steal Sheep

DWR have been list­ing the first four dif­fer­ent house­num­bers in their cat­a­logue since the end of 2006 now. They are named for pop­u­lar appeal, not nec­es­sar­ily after proper his­tor­i­cal or typo­graph­i­cal con­ven­tions.
Clas­sic is my own adap­tion of Bodoni; for Con­tem­po­rary I some­what rearranged Meta Bold, Indus­trial is a generic indus­trial type­face as neg­a­tive sten­cils, and Tech is my attempt at design­ing num­bers with­out any diag­o­nal strokes. The mate­ri­als are laser-cut, enam­elled steel, extruded and anodized alu­minium, laser-cut, painted steel and water-cut, pol­ished stain­less steel.

The Tech num­bers have no diag­o­nal shapes. This could even­tu­ally turn into a com­plete typeface.


Even an accom­plished face like Meta needs to be adapted to the pro­duc­tion process. The rout­ing tool for the alu­minium extru­sion can never achieve a finely pointed inner cor­ner. Rather than leave the shape of these details to mechan­i­cal coin­ci­dence, I drew radii that would not present any prob­lems in the tool­ing process. They do look some­what exag­ger­ated in the draw­ings, but work well in metal. The slighly bolder house­num­bers are shown on top, with fig­ures from FF Meta Bold below.

You need no typo­graphic train­ing to fix these house­num­bers to the wall. The drilling tem­plates are printed in yel­low on clear acetate in order to be vis­i­ble against any back­ground, and they also pro­vide proper spac­ing for the num­bers.