The history and legacy of Emigre, the magazine that smashed it all.

I promised in a previous article that I would talk a bit deeper about Emigre, a magazine-cum-foundry that revolutionised graphic design and in particular typography in the 80’s, and continued to challenge the discipline thereafter.

It became a milestone in the shift towards desktop publishing and all graphic designers nowadays can claim to build on Emigre’s legacy.

The story of Emigre as a magazine started in 1984, when Marc Susan, Menno Meyjes and Rudy VanderLans met in University of California-Berkeley, San Francisco, all of them being Dutch and living in the United States, it gave them the name for their magazine, as themselves where “émigrés” -Immigrants – there. In fact the group first set a graphic design studio, Emigre graphics, that was still active alongside the magazine and help with providing funds through regular commissioned work. They set to found the magazine after realising the promises of early desktop publishing advancements and Emigre started as one of the first publication set entirely on a Mac computer. Marc Susan and Menno Meyjes soon departed, and left Rudy VanderLans and his Slovakia-born (then Czechoslovakia) wife Zuzana Licko to manage and edit the magazine.

We met at the University of California at Berkeley where I was an undergraduate at the College of Environmental Design and Rudy was a graduate student in photography. This was in 1982–83. After college we both did all sorts of design-related odd jobs. There was no direction. Then, in 1984 the Macintosh was introduced, we bought one, and everything started to fall into place. We both, each in our own way, really enjoyed this machine. It forced us to question everything we had learnt about design. We both enjoyed that process of exploration, of how far you could push the limits. Rudy is more intuitive; I’m more methodical. Yin and yang. It seemed to click, and still does.

The first issues of the magazine focused on broad cultural themes, with an emphasis on experimental layouts, but then shifted toward graphic design discourse, and even more focus on experimental typography, particularly with issue number 9, featuring the work of Vaughan Oliver at 4AD.

Typography within the magazine was mainly the work of Zuzana Licko who was already an accomplished typographer and early computer adopter.

I started my venture with bitmap type designs, created for the coarse resolutions of the computer screen and dot matrix printer. The challenge was that because the early computers were so limited in what they could do you really had to design something special. Even if it was difficult to adapt calligraphy to lead and later lead to photo technology, it could be done, but it was physically impossible to adapt 8-point Goudy Old Style to 72 dots to the inch. In the end you couldn't tell Goudy Old Style from Times Roman or any other serif text face.

Alongside the magazine, they also founded Emigre fonts, the foundry that licences the typefaces created by Zuzana and other type designers.

The magazine focus on typography was total when in the 15th issue “do you read me?”

In parrallel with the magazine, the foundry started to release an enormous amount of new typefaces like Oakland, Mrs Eaves and Matrix, and introducing the now mainstream way of licencing and downloading fonts from an online platform. The magazine also started to offer other media like CD-ROMs featuring music tracks and documentaries. All these innovations came when a new collaborator, Tim Starback was added to the team.

Emigre fonts and the magazine challenging layout starkly departed from the status quo at the time (minimalism and readability) which made them prone to being criticised by grandees at the time, particularly Massimo Vignelli (whom I talked about earlier), and Paul Rand, which, as expected, put eyes on their work in way they couldn’t have hoped. Their work brought an equal amount of love and hate, putting them squarely in the camp of trailblazers.

[developping into theoretical design magazine] That happened little by little. The Macintosh was introduced in 1984-85, and we were very excited about it – as opposed to a lot of graphic designers who thought it was a hideous tool. And then we noticed – though this may be hindsight – that the whole industry, not just design but also printing and typesetting, was slowly being turned upside down because of this computer. So we thought it was an opportune time to start focusing on design again.

We can place Emigre overall input within the realm of what we now call “post-modernism”, pushing back the hegemony of the international style, rejecting minimalism while building on previous eras, making use of irony, politically charged content and deconstructed layouts - alongside graphic designers such as David Carson, April Greiman, Malcom Garrett , Paula Scher and the design group Memphis.

By the 2000s, Emigre experimented with different formats and media, with further collaborative issues, until the last one, issue #69, which was published in 2005.

This last period continued to explore relationship with design, culture and technology in a way many magazines do nowadays but was very pioneering at the time.

The magazine still exerts a massive influence on contemporary designers, as a primary force of liberation from a discipline that was initially deemed as purely commercial, thriving not to challenge the public in order to maximise the impact of the message to the consumer, something that Emigre contested, arguing that things such as readability and minimalism weren’t the sole way to achieve direct communication.

As a team it went on to gather international recognition, winning various prestigious awards such as the 1994 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and the 1998 Charles Nypels Award for excellence in the field of typography. In 1993 they were selected as a leading design innovator in the First Annual I.D. Forty. Emigre is also a recipient of the 1997 American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal Award, its highest honours. In October 2010 the Emigre team was inducted as Honorary members of the Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago, and in 2013 Licko received the prestigious Annual Typography Award from the Society of Typographic Aficionados.

Their work is held in various institutions permanent collections, such as

• The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
• The Design Museum, London
• The Denver Art Museum
• The Museum of Modern Art , San Francisco
• The Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich

In 2016, Emigre donated its entire archive to San Francisco-based Letterform Archive. The gift included archival material in various media, such as every Emigre type catalogue, development files for original Emigre typefaces, audio taped interviews and mechanicals for Emigre magazine, and various correspondence. The Online Archive hosts a complete run of the magazine, digitised in high fidelity for on-screen reading.

Further reading

"Emigre: Graphic Design into the Digital Realm" by Teal Triggs: https://search.worldcat.org/title/43679755

Emigre website: https://www.emigre.com/Magazine

Essay: https://www.emigre.com/Essays/Emigre/CriticalConditionsandtheEmigreSpirit

Interviews:

https://www.typotheque.com/articles/rudy-vanderlans-editor-of-emigre

https://www.myfonts.com/pages/newsletters-cc-201606

https://www.fastcompany.com/1661918/type-master-an-interview-with-emigres-rudy-vanderlans?cid=search

Emigre fonts on adobe fonts: https://fonts.adobe.com/foundries/emigre

Letterform archives repository: https://oa.letterformarchive.org/?searchType=3&dims=Firms&vals0=Emigre

Critical writings: https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/cult-of-the-ugly