Design history · Periodicals
Emigre
The quarterly that made the early Mac's limitations look like design decisions.
In 1984 Rudy VanderLans — a Dutch graphic designer newly arrived in California — launched a magazine from Berkeley with a first print run of 500. He called it Emigre: A Magazine for Exiles. His wife and collaborator Zuzana Licko, Slovak-born and trained in visual communication at Berkeley, designed the type. The tools were a first-generation Macintosh; the bitmap constraints of the 128K machine became the magazine's aesthetic signature. Licko's early typefaces — Emperor, Oakland, Modula — worked with the pixel grid rather than against it. The magazine grew into something harder to categorise — type specimen, design journal and running argument about what graphic design was for, all at once. The legibility debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s — Massimo Vignelli's charge that experimental typography was destroying communication; Licko's counter, "you read best what you read most" — played out partly in its pages. Issue 51 (1999) carried the First Things First 2000 manifesto, reprinting the 1964 call for socially responsible design with 33 new signatories. Emigre ran 69 issues before closing in 2005. MoMA holds a complete set and five fonts from the Emigre Fonts library.
Design history · Periodicals
Emigre
The quarterly that made the early Mac's limitations look like design decisions.
In 1984 Rudy VanderLans — a Dutch graphic designer newly arrived in California — launched a magazine from Berkeley with a first print run of 500. He called it Emigre: A Magazine for Exiles. His wife and collaborator Zuzana Licko, Slovak-born and trained in visual communication at Berkeley, designed the type. The tools were a first-generation Macintosh; the bitmap constraints of the 128K machine became the magazine's aesthetic signature. Licko's early typefaces — Emperor, Oakland, Modula — worked with the pixel grid rather than against it. The magazine grew into something harder to categorise — type specimen, design journal and running argument about what graphic design was for, all at once. The legibility debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s — Massimo Vignelli's charge that experimental typography was destroying communication; Licko's counter, "you read best what you read most" — played out partly in its pages. Issue 51 (1999) carried the First Things First 2000 manifesto, reprinting the 1964 call for socially responsible design with 33 new signatories. Emigre ran 69 issues before closing in 2005. MoMA holds a complete set and five fonts from the Emigre Fonts library.
Key facts
- Founded
- 1984, Berkeley, California
- Founders
- Rudy VanderLans (editor/art director) and Zuzana Licko (type director)
- Publisher
- Emigre, Inc. — also trading as Emigre Fonts from 1985
- Format
- Oversized quarterly; later text reader format; multimedia (issues 60–65 with CD/DVD)
- Run
- 1984–2005 (69 issues)
- Known for
- Early Macintosh design, bitmap and digital typefaces, legibility-wars debates, First Things First 2000 (issue 51)
Key works & examples
Emigre no. 1 — A Magazine for Exiles
1984
Issue 1 was printed at West Coast Print Center, Berkeley, in an edition of 500. It called itself "the magazine that ignores boundaries" and had no specific design brief — VanderLans photographed immigrants and exiles in the San Francisco Bay Area while Licko set the type on a 128K Mac. The bitmap constraints of the machine were not a limitation the first issue worked around; they were the look. The print run sold out, and the project continued. A complete archive of all 69 issues is held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Emigre no. 7 — early bitmap era
1987
By issue 7 the magazine had settled into its characteristic early look: type set in Licko's bitmap faces — Oakland, Emperor, Modula — at sizes and weights that resolved sharply on the first laser printers, with none of the pretence that digitally set type should approximate the hand-drawn strokes of metal composition. Oakland, designed in 1985, was Licko's first commercially released typeface; it worked with the pixel grid rather than against it. Each issue of Emigre in this period functioned as a type specimen as much as a magazine — the only vehicle for distributing and demonstrating the new digital faces to a design readership. Licko re-released Oakland as Lo-Res in 2001, extending the bitmap logic to multiple optical sizes.
Mrs Eaves — Zuzana Licko revival of Baskerville
1996
Mrs Eaves, released in 1996, was Licko's revival of John Baskerville's 18th-century serif — named after Sarah Eaves, Baskerville's housekeeper and later wife. The face departed from strict historical reconstruction: Licko reduced x-height, widened letterforms and gave the italic a more pronounced calligraphic lean. The result was widely adopted in book and magazine design through the late 1990s and 2000s. It is among the most widely licensed typefaces from the Emigre catalogue and is held in the MoMA design collection. By 1996 Licko's work had moved well past the bitmap experiments of the 1980s into historical revival — and Mrs Eaves was where that shift became legible.
First Things First 2000 — Emigre no. 51
1999
Issue 51 (published 1999, cover-dated 2000) printed the First Things First 2000 manifesto — an update of Ken Garland's 1964 original signed by 33 designers and educators including Tibor Kalman, Erik Spiekermann, Jonathan Barnbrook and Rudy VanderLans himself. The manifesto called for designers to redirect their skills from selling commodities toward "more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication." Publishing it put Emigre at the centre of the design-ethics debate that ran through the late 1990s. Eye, Adbusters and Print reprinted the manifesto the same year. It is the most-cited single editorial act in the magazine's history.
Emigre no. 11 — Ambition/Fear (1989)
1989
By issue 11, Emigre had settled into a larger format and a more deliberate editorial position: design criticism and cultural commentary rather than culture-at-large. The 1989 issues coincided with the period in which the legibility debates were sharpening. Vignelli had begun making public statements about the illegibility of deconstructivist typography; Licko's counter-argument — that reading is a learned behaviour and legibility follows familiarity — appeared in these mid-run issues. The design of the magazine embodied the argument: dense columns of set type alongside large-format experimental compositions, treating the page as a test site.
Matrix — Zuzana Licko display typeface
1986
Matrix was designed in 1986 as a high-contrast serif intended to push the capabilities of the early laser printer beyond the coarser resolutions Oakland and Emperor had addressed. The face has thin horizontal strokes and strong vertical stems — a structure that resolved sharply at 300dpi in a way that traditional revivals did not. It was the house face for Emigre magazine through the late 1980s and early 1990s, set across covers and editorial. Licko released Matrix II in 2007, extending the family with additional weights and optical sizes. The Art Institute of Chicago holds Emigre no. 21 (1992), which is among the most-discussed Matrix-set issues.