Rudy vanderlans and zuzana licko biography
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Critical Conditions:
Zuzana Licko, Rudy VanderLans, and the Emigre Spirit
By Michael Dooley
This essay was first published in 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 copies and its circulation peaked at 7, 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, hav
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Rudy VanderLans was born in The Hague, Holland in and studied graphic design at the Royal College of Fine Arts. In he moved to the US and studied photography at UC Berkeley, where he met the Czechoslovakian-born designer Zuzana Licko. They married in In VanderLans launched the magazine Émigré, which became famous for its pioneering use of the Apple Macintosh. Part of its innovation lay in its use of typefaces such as Oakland and kejsare, designed by Licko to complement the low-resolution output of the early Macintosh. In the mids the company started to man these typefaces available to other designers; it now publishes some 70 faces designed by Licko and other typographers. In VanderLans set up the Emigre record label.
Julia Thrift: Why did you decide to move to the US?
Rudy VanderLans: inom was about 25 years old and I wanted to see more of the world. inom had been working as a designer for about three years and was a bit disappointed with graphic design. I felt that perhaps I
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Zuzana Licko
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Zuzana Licko was born in in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia and emigrated with her parents to the U.S. in She graduated with a grad in Graphic Communications from the University of California at Berkeley in
Together with her husband, Rudy VanderLans, Licko started the design company Emigre Graphics in The company became world renowned for its self-published magazine and type foundry which were greatly inspired by the new technical possibilities offered by the introduction of the Macintosh computer. Licko and VanderLans became early adopters to the new technology and they used the computer to experiment and created some of the very first typeface designs and digital page layouts causing great consternation within the realm of graphic design. Eventually, exposure of the typefaces in utvandrare magazine resulted in demand for the fonts which lead to the creation of the utvandrare Type foundry. This growing library of digital ty