Critical Conditions:
Zuzana Licko, Rudy VanderLans, and the Emigre SpiritBy Michael Dooley
This essay was first published in 1998 in
the book Graphic Design USA 18.
For over a decade of typeface design and
magazine publishing, Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans have
withstood virulent attacks from an entrenched design
establishment as well as from their contemporaries. Throughout
it all, they continued to pursue their unique visions and,
consequently, have been a prime force in revolutionizing the
industry and cultivating a spirit of exploration.
Brian Eno's quip about the Velvet
Underground - that only a few thousand people bought their
record but every one of them went on to form a band - could
apply as well to Emigre. Although the print run of the first issue was
500 copies and its circulation peaked at 7,000 several years
ago, its reverberations are still being felt around the world.
The magazine that VanderLans published and art directed, and
the fonts Licko developed for it, have stimulated designers to
defy, and even overthrow, entrenched rules and to set new
standards.
Neither Licko nor VanderLans set out to
transform the face of modern design. They achieved their
notoriety rather unconventionally. Bay Area designer Chuck
Byrne, who has closely observed their career since its
inception, explains: "In the last fifty years or so,
making a reputation for yourself was basically a process of
winning competitions, getting your work published, and going
around pontificating to the world about how great you are. What
drove the establishment crazy was that Rudy and Zuzana totally
short-circuited this apprenticeship and became famous simply by
designing for this international group of admirers."
Licko was born in Bratislava,
Czechoslovakia, and moved to the United States at the age of
seven. Her father, a biomathematician, provided her with access
to computers and the opportunity to design her first typeface,
a Greek alphabet, for his personal use. She entered the
University of California at Berkeley in 1981 as an
undergraduate. She had planned to study architecture, but
changed her major to visual studies and pursued a graphic
communications degree. Being left-handed, she hated her
calligraphy class, where she was forced to write with her right
hand.
VanderLans was born in the Hague, Holland,
and attended the Royal Academy of Fine Art from 1974 to 1979.
Initially aspiring to become an illustrator, he enrolled in the
graphic design department. After an apprenticeship at Wim
Crouwel's Total Design studio, he did corporate identity
work at Vorm Vijf and Tel Design. When his application to the
UC Berkeley graduate program was accepted in 1981, he moved to
California, where he met Licko. They were married in 1983.
Also in 1983, mistakenly thinking he was
applying for a job at Chronicle Books, VanderLans found himself
at the San Francisco Chronicle. He was hired by the editorial art director to
do illustrations, cover designs, and graphs. His frustrations
with the harsh demands of a daily newspaper motivated him to
seek other creative outlets.
Emigre magazine
was originally intended as a cultural journal to showcase
artists, photographers, poets, and architects. The first issue
was put together in 1984 in a 11.5" by 17" format by
VanderLans and two other Dutch immigrants. Since there was no
budget for typesetting, the text was primarily typewriter type
that had been resized on a photocopier.
Working with the newly invented Macintosh
computer and a bitmap font tool, Licko began creating fonts for
the magazine. Emperor, Oakland, and Emigre were designed as coarse bitmapped faces to accommodate
low-resolution printer output. They were used in Emigre #2, and, after
several readers inquired about their availability, she began
running ads for them in issue three.
By 1987, the other founders had left Emigre magazine.
Working under the title Emigre Graphics, Licko edited screen
fonts at Adobe Systems, Inc., while VanderLans, who had left
the Chronicle, designed new magazines: GlasHaus for an organizer of
party events and Shift for San Francisco's Artspace gallery. He also
continued to publish Emigre while Licko constructed more fonts with bold,
simple geometry, such as Matrix and Modula. Their cold, rational appearance served as an
anchor to VanderLans's free-spirited layouts.
Emigre became a
full-fledged graphic design journal in 1988 with issue ten, produced by students at Cranbrook Academy of
Art in Michigan. VanderLans concentrated on work that was being
neglected by other design publications, either because it
didn't adhere to traditional canons or it was still in its
formative stages. The issues, each built around a theme, have
featured Ed Fella, Rick Valicenti, and David Carson
from the United States, Vaughan Oliver, Nick Bell, and Designers Republic from Britain, several Dutch designers, and many
others who were exploring new territory. Several controversial
articles and interviews have appeared over the years, provoking
other design publications to become more opinionated.
In 1989, the fonts had become enough of a
commercial success that Licko and VanderLans gave up
freelancing and concentrated exclusively on their own business.
Emigre,
which had been published erratically, settled into a quarterly
schedule.
In designing Emigre, VanderLans rejected standardized formats in
favor of organic grid structures that reflected his enthusiasm
toward the contents. Computerized page composition gave him the
flexibility to reinvent the look of the magazine with every
issue. Sometimes several articles would run through the pages
concurrently, each text differentiated by font, size, leading,
and column width, creating an impression of eavesdropping on
several simultaneous conversations. Nuanced type variations
within sentences created the mood and rhythm of spoken words.
Even the logo has gone through several permutations.
When their work began to receive public
attention, it was attacked for promulgating visual incoherence
and viewed as a threat to Modernist ideals and an affront to
universal notions of beauty. Massimo Vignelli was their most
vociferous critic. Throughout the early '90s, he
denounced the magazine and fonts as garbage, lacking depth,
refinement, elegance, or a sense of history.
The text and typography were hardly
indecipherable to its intended audience. In fact, Emigre was much
more inviting and involving for its readers, who had a high
degree of visual sophistication. "People read best what
they read most" has become a credo for Licko and
VanderLans and has been adopted as a rallying cry by designers
eager to challenge preconceptions of type design and magazine
layout.
At the same time Licko and VanderLans were
being pilloried by traditionalists, designers who had once
championed their work for its aggressiveness began to condemn
it as too readily identifiable, and therefore unusable. Beach Culture magazine
published an issue with a cover line that boasted "no
Emigre fonts," although the logo itself was set in
Licko's Senator.
Much of the initial opposition has abated,
as the same designs and font styles once considered ugly have
become assimilated throughout mainstream print and electronic
media. The Emigre sensibility has achieved commercial acceptance by
popularizers like David Carson. No longer viewed as radical or
unique, the work of Licko and VanderLans regularly garners
accolades from many notables in the field.
In 1995 Emigre reduced its page size to
more conventional magazine proportions and adapted a relatively
staid, conservative appearance. The contents also underwent a
dramatic change. VanderLans explains, "Instead of
focusing on the designers' intentions and the
designers' work, we decided to turn the tables and look
at how this work is impacting our culture." CalArts
instructor Jeffery Keedy, who has been affiliated with the
magazine for nearly a decade and whose Keedy Sans typeface is distributed by Emigre Fonts, is
now a frequent contributor, as are North Carolina State
University professor Andrew Blauvelt and writer/designer Anne
Burdick.
Some readers have become put off by the
academic, often pedantic tone of what they consider diatribes
and manifestoes rather than essays. VanderLans is intrigued by
"the readers who categorically dismiss design writing and
design criticism of any kind. Many designers simply do not see
how it connects to them and their profession. How to make it
relevant is a great challenge."
Keedy sees the new emphasis on theory and
analysis as a necessity. "Emigre couldn't continue as this subcult
anomaly, a fanzine for the avant-garde, because the avant-garde
is over. Rudy and Zuzana were in the middle of a moment of
change in the eighties and the next generation is still doing
the same thing. There hasn't been another paradigm shift,
so there just isn't enough hip, groovy new stuff to
show."
As the text has become foregrounded, many
who purchased Emigre for visual rather than intellectual
stimulus have lost interest. Chuck Byrne still sees much that
is praiseworthy in the magazine's layout. "The
emphasis has gone from individual spreads to these astounding
studies in form spread out over a large number of pages.
Rudy's fiddling with Modernist concepts the way an
accomplished jazz musician might play with a theme. His work
has always been a lot more formal than most people
realize."
Licko's fonts are also evolving in
reflection of the magazine's changing contents. After a
variety of releases, including a set of pinwheel dingbats and a French-tickler version of Modula, she is putting her own spin on classical serifs
with Mrs
Eaves and Filosofia, reinterpretations of Baskerville and Bodoni.
Respected typographers now publicly
acknowledge the legitimacy of Licko's font designs.
Matthew Carter, a 1995 AIGA gold medalist, proclaimed,
"Two ideas seem to me to stand behind the originality of
Zuzana's work: that the proper study of typography is
type, not calligraphy or history, and that legibility is not an
intrinsic quality of type but something acquired through
use."
Licko's ascendance in a primarily
male-dominated profession and her bypassing of traditional
training have been an inspiration to a generation of font
designers with access to computer technology. The market has
been deluged with knockoffs of her style. She comments:
"It's funny: when I look back on my work over the
last twelve years, I realize that at first I had trouble
getting people to take my work seriously, while now I have
trouble getting them to stop copying my work."
To the surprise of those who recall Massimo
Vignelli's earlier excoriations against Emigre, he recently
produced a direct-mail promotion for Filosofia, which led Licko
to speculate on the possibility that "Massimo's
willingness to collaborate on our announcement reflects
Emigre's ability to bridge different
approaches."
Although quite flattered to be the first of
a new generation of designers to be selected for the Gold
Medal, the adversarial VanderLans is "not so deluded by
the praise not to also realize that the award is part of the
AIGA's concerted effort to appeal to a younger generation
in order to remain significant as an organization. And I can
appreciate that kind of thinking. If you believe you have a
valid idea, which the AIGA has, then it makes sense to try and
sell that to as large an audience as possible."
Licko and VanderLans have always claimed to
eschew marketing strategy, maintaining that they produce their
products primarily to please themselves. They have never denied
accusations of self-indulgence. In fact, it is a point of
pride. As a self-published, self-supporting venture, the
self-proclaimed "magazine that ignores boundaries"
has been free to engage in highly experimental research and
development. The fact that they have parlayed their passions
into a successful international enterprise is simply a
fortuitous byproduct.
Emigre Fonts now offers around fifty type
families designed by close to twenty designers. From an office
in Sacramento, Emigre Graphics also sells posters, T-shirts,
and other peripheral items through its catalog and Internet
website. A music label that was launched in 1990 is presently
"dormant," as VanderLans puts it.
Licko and VanderLans invest as much time
and effort in the business side as in the creative side.
"Without our personal involvement in licensing contracts,
distribution agreements, legal matters, accounting, etc.,
Emigre would simply not exist. Fact of the matter is, we
consider ourselves as much businesspeople as we consider
ourselves designers." Byrne strongly agrees, pointing
out, "Anyone who considers Rudy a wild primitive who
doesn't know anything about organizing information should
look at any Emigre order form. They have always been the
clearest, most concise designs for sending in money."
Emigre, which has been famous for making
the most of low-budget production values, has converted to full
color with its 42nd issue, which was
sent to the Emigre mailing list of 45,000 and is being offered
free to anyone who fills out a reply card. The increased
circulation is part of an attempt to attract advertisers.
Keedy sees this as a smart move, one that
will expand their audience. "There's not a huge
demand for the magazine right now, but I think this strategy
will, in fact, create that demand. I see Emigre ten years from
now as a slick, glossy special interest magazine that has its
own niche.
"Naturally, people are going to say
Rudy and Zuzana are selling out and going mainstream.
They're in a weird phase right now, and the question is,
can they make it? I think they will. They have always been
ahead of the market, not behind it. They're very much in
their time and always on the move. That's the critical
factor in all they've done."
|
 |
Essays on Emigre
An Ending
By Rick Poynor
Critical Conditions:
Zuzana Licko, Rudy VanderLans, and the Emigre Spirit
By Michael Dooley
Digressions and Transgressions: Emigre (The Texts)
By Andrew Blauvelt
Seeing and Reading
A Viewer’s Guide to Periodic Literature
By Kenneth FitzGerald
Graphic designers probably won’t read this . . . but,
By Mr. Keedy
Where’s the party? (Still searching.)
By David Cabianca
|
