When the freelancer Tal Leming had finished digitising the typeface Bullet for House Industries in 2000, Rich Roat asked him whether he would be interested in completing the missing accented characters in House Gothic. Tal took a look at the fonts, and then spent a week firing off e-mails with suggestions for improvement to Rich: “Is it ok with you if I harmonise the weights of M and N?”, “Could I revise the character set to make the font family more melodious?”, “Would you be open to a slight reorganisation of the family?”, “I think an extended version would work well …”.

Six months later, Leming and his wife moved from Louisiana to the small city of Wilmington in Delaware, where he started a full-time job at House.


House Gothic 23’s appeared on the book, film poster and soundtrack of About A Boy

What is the secret of the expanded House Gothic 23 typeface, with its ten Extended and ten Condensed headline fonts, and its three text fonts (10 + 10 + 3 = 23)? It is the myriad possible combinations of the different versions, which always go well together despite their varying x-heights and widths.  This characteristic is manifested most consistently in the Black font, whose counters are identical in both the Condensed and Extended versions.

The text fonts too are noteworthy, and full credit must go to Leming for deriving them from the eccentric headline font.