ZUZANA LICKO
Known for co-founding the graphic design magazine Emigre, with her husband Rudy VanderLans, Zuzana Licko is one of the big influencial faces on the modern day design stage. The Slovak-born American designer is also well known creating numerous typefaces, including Mrs Eaves.
On Emigre
Between 1984 and 2005 Emigre Graphics published Emigre, a graphic design magazine. In 1984 in San Francisco, California, United States was where it was first published. Art-directed by Rudy VanderLans using fonts designed by his wife, Zuzana Licko, Emigre was one of the first publications to use Macintosh computers and had a large influence on graphic designers moving into desktop publishing.
The magazine began with a focus on the émigré and for the first eight issues main concerns were boundaries, international culture, travel accounts and alienation (as the issues’ titles suggest).
Beginning with Issue 9 the magazine explored design in itself, devoting issues the Macintosh, type design and individual graphic designers. Increasingly, Emigre became a platform for essays and writings on design.
Emigre then took a sharp turn with four re-formatted issues in 2001 and 2002 that included one DVD (“Catfish,” an experimental documentary film on the work of designer and performance artist Elliott Earls) and three compact discs (featuring the music of Honey Barbara, The Grassy Knoll and Scenic.
In its fifth and final incarnation, the last six issues of Emigre were co-published by Princeton Architectural Press as small softcover books. The last issue, The End, was published in 2005.
Fonts by Zuzana
Her admiration for the Didone serif typeface Bodoni led her to design and several variations of Bodoni, in the form of digital font for computer type and some forms were also used for text.
Before working with computers, Licko’s favorite typeface was Bodoni. She enjoyed the:
“clean lines and geometric shapes and the variety of headline style choices ,but for long texts the extreme contrast made it difficult to read at small sizes.”
Bodoni influenced Licko’s work on Filosofia, one of her typefaces. Like other revivals of typefaces, Licko’s revival of Bodoni focused on geometry and symmetry. She also incorporated details like slightly rounded serif endings.
Licko’s Filosofia was designed to be modified for use either in print or on a computer. There is a “Regular” version of the Filosofia family which is designed to be used in print. To create Filosofia, Licko studied different styles of Bodoni, including the original print work and recent revivals, such as ITC Bodoni.
Mrs Eaves is a transitional serif typeface. It is a variant of Baskerville, designed in Birmingham, England in the 1750s. Mrs. Eaves adapts Baskerville for use in display contexts, such as headings and book blurbs, through the use of a low x-height and a range of unusual combined characters or ligatures.
In Texts on Type, Licko writes about her take on Bodoni and what Mrs. Eaves meant to her:
“In my rendition of this classic typeface, I have addressed the highly criticized feature of sharp contrast. To a great degree, the critics were wrong; it did not prevent Baskerville from becoming assimilated as a highly legible text face, and in fact, the high contrast between stems and hairlines became quite desirable, as is apparent in typefaces such as Bodoni, which followed in the lineage.”
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