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The Houses That Sears Built
Last year, I listened to a podcast about a strange and peculiar set of early 20th century mail-order houses known as Sears Houses. I was immediately fascinated by the idea that one could order an entire house from a Sears-Roebuck catalog, receive all the materials by train, and then, hypothetically, build the entire structure themselves. I decided this would be an ideal topic for my senior capstone book.
My initial research focused on learning more about the history of these houses. I spent a lot of time looking through old catalogs and general Sears advertising, and I also read Rosemary Thornton’s book The Houses That Sears Built. I ended up using sections of that book as written content for my project. From that research, I identified several key themes that I wanted the design of my book to reflect. These words included: modular, built, structured, personal, cozy, and interlocking. To convey these themes, I used blocks of justified type stacked together with illustrations of the Sears homes to create a modular feeling and furthered those ideas by creating my own modular typeface using the illustrations of various tools and materials from the catalogs. I also experimented with borders and frame shapes to reference the original catalogs and architectural motifs.
I knew early on that materials and construction of the book was also going to be an important consideration in my project. I ultimately used 1-inch thick wood for the covers, which attached to the piano hinge binding with metal hinges. To create the binding, I used threaded rods with hex nuts to hold everything in place. I particularly enjoyed how this method of binding created trapezoid shapes where the signatures overlapped, as it referenced the dovetail joinery used in Sears building materials to simplify construction.
InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator
Amy Auman
Capstone II
Inspiration
Custom Type
Section Openers
Subsection Openers
Spreads
Catalog Section
Drafts