Yesterday I saw the first housenumbers in Real Life, on Jane and Louis’ office in Berkeley. The numbers are generously spaced to allow for conditions here in the USA, where people tend to sit in cars, looking for numbers quite far away. The number combination here presents a worst case scenario: two Ones which don’t need a lot of space and have a strong horizontal bar at the bottom, next to a 6 and a 9 that have to overshoot at top and bottom in order to look right.
Louis didn’t have a hammer drill, which made it very difficult to drill into a hard brick wall. That is why not all the holes are as precisely positioned as the templates would have allowed for. The 9 hangs too low. On paper, one would have to individually adjust the space between 1, 6, 1, 9. That, however, would be asking too much of your regular DIY homemaker, so I was not allowed to include kerning tables in the packages. Louis, on the other hand, is a journalist with more design savvy than a lot of designers I know, and he would have managed.
Normally, electric drills are not tools that type designers consider when planning for application of type on media.
These are the Contemporary numbers, made from grey anodised aluminium, based on FF Meta Bold.
It would seem this could be solved by allowing the mounting bolts to be fixed (as they need to be), but create a sliding plate on the back of the numbers that allow for a bit of vertical adjustment. This plate could be secured via its own set of miniature screws/allen bolts. I realize this adds to the complexity and manufacturing cost, but the vertical placement (and perhaps a small bit of horizontal kerning) seems like it could be solved.
…this adds to the complexity and manufacturing cost…
This is exactly why that was not implemented. Of course that was suggested, but we designers often have to give in to the infinite wisdom of the marketing people. As in this case.
Louis could always say that the nine was from a non-aligning charcter set. Did you include non-aligning template guides as an option or are these all mono spaced?
They wouldn’t let me provide Old Style numbers, Would have only meant to make 3 more tools for 1, 2 and 0, as the rest of the numbers are just shifted up or down. But the buyers deemed that too complicated. And the numbers are Tabulating Figures, i.e. they are all equally wide. If you mounted them, you would use your judgement and even space them a little closer, depending on the viewing distance.
Shame, I think the non-aligning sets made the FF Meta number sets, although not everyone got it. It would help to make all those Eichlers that’ll sport these look less uniform. On a sep. note are you going to issue non-aligning sets for Unit or have I missed something?
That is why I suggested OsF for the Contemporary house numbers, but the client always knows best.
And for FF Unit there are smaller, kinda-old-style figures in the SmallCap weights. And with the OT version, you get all sorts of figures: tabular, smaller than cap-height with slight ascenders and descenders, as small as small caps with those ascenders and descenders, and full cap-height with nothing going below or above. In fact there are more things in there then I can remember.
Cool Erik. But while I’m at this, what about the arrows? Shift>? Or proper arrows?
Which arrows? Unit? It has lots of stuff, all the dotted Meta-arrows as well as straight ones. Perhaps i need to make an entry about all the arrows i have ever designed. A lot of work, as i don’t remember half of them. In the meantime, look at the entry for Officina Display that i just published. Those arrows are also in Unit Dingbats.
Thanks Guv.
We are trying to buy a set of the orange industrial house #’s from DWR and they are sold out of the 2. Our address is 3217. Any thoughts on how i can get the 2? would you mind emailing me at joshbarton@cox.net