San Francisco and Berkeley, 1984 to 1986.

Emigre began as a magazine, and the type foundry grew out of it. Typeroom, writing on 11 April 2022, says the magazine was founded by three Dutchmen who had met in San Francisco: Marc Susan, Menno Meyjes and Rudy VanderLans. It was published from 1984 until 2005 in Berkeley, California, mostly as a quarterly. The early issues dealt with boundaries, travel and the experience of living abroad, which is where the title came from. Wikipedia notes that the name is officially spelled without the accents of the French word émigré.

The foundry’s other founder is the type designer Zuzana Licko, VanderLans’s partner. In a Spring 2002 profile in Eye magazine, Rhonda Rubinstein wrote that Licko was born in Czechoslovakia, moved to the United States with her family as a schoolgirl, and took a degree in graphic communications at the University of California at Berkeley. The profile says an early commission came from her father, who asked for a Greek alphabet for his own use.

Licko told Eye that she started building bitmap fonts on the Apple Macintosh in 1984 as an experiment, with no client and no plan to start a foundry. She said that VanderLans had started the magazine with two Dutch artists as a showcase for émigré artists, and that issue 3 was the turning point: it was typeset entirely in her early low-resolution fonts. Readers then asked where they could get the typefaces. “It was the start of Emigre Fonts,” she said. For a while, she added, she sold typesetting with her fonts, because many designers who wanted them did not yet own a Macintosh.

Rubinstein’s profile names Emperor, Emigre and Oakland as faces that appeared in the magazine and were soon advertised for sale when the couple co-founded the foundry. Wikipedia, citing the company, dates the foundry to 1985; Typeroom says that by 1986 Emigre was selling commercial licences for its digital fonts under the name Emigre Fonts. The business behind both is Emigre, Inc., which trades as Emigre Fonts and is based in Berkeley.

Typeroom also explains how the magazine paid its way. It was self-funded, at first through commercial design work that VanderLans and Licko did under the name Emigre Graphics, with some income from advertising and subscriptions. Later issues, it says, were funded mainly by licensing the typefaces. Licko made the same point to Eye: the magazine gave her a reason to keep developing the fonts and a way to promote them, while the fonts gave the magazine its look and let the couple set it in-house.

A magazine in four formats.

The magazine was the foundry’s main brand surface for two decades, and it changed shape several times. Letterform Archive, announcing on 7 April 2020 that the full run was free to read online, notes that issues 2 to 4 carried the subtitle “The Magazine that Ignores Boundaries”. The archive says it received the donation of Emigre, Inc.’s archives in 2016, and that VanderLans and Licko helped catalogue the contributors to every issue.

Typeroom traces the later formats. It says a shift in content began with issue 9, which featured the work of Vaughan Oliver at the record label 4AD, and that the articles moved towards design practice and criticism. The magazine left its oversized format in 1995, starting with issue 33, for a size better suited to long texts, and kept that size until issue 60 in 2001. Issues 60 to 63 came with compact discs and a DVD. In its last incarnation, issues 64 to 69 were co-published with Princeton Architectural Press as small softcover books, and the final issue, titled The End, came out in 2005.

The magazine also carried the debate that attached itself to the foundry. Typeroom says Licko’s line “You read best what you read most”, from an interview in issue 15 in 1990, set off what became known as the “Legibility Wars”. Rubinstein’s Eye profile records that the modernist designer Massimo Vignelli criticised the new typography. Wikipedia adds that Vignelli later designed the poster announcing Licko’s Filosofia.

Guest editors widened the magazine’s voice. Typeroom names Gail Swanlund, Anne Burdick, Andrew Blauvelt and the studio Experimental Jetset among those VanderLans invited to edit issues. Rubinstein described issue 60 as a music-oriented incarnation that still worked as a testing ground and type specimen for Emigre typefaces, which is how the foundry used the publication throughout.

Selling the fonts became a brand surface of its own. Wikipedia says long-time collaborator Tim Starback built Emigre’s early online ordering system, called Now Serving, on the FirstClass software, with customers dialling in by modem. In 2022 Typeroom reported on an Emigre Fonts app that lets readers page through the magazine on a phone or tablet. In 2011, Wikipedia says, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired Emigre families for its collection, among them Licko’s Oakland, which had been renamed Lo-Res in 2001.

Specimens, catalogues and names.

A type foundry’s identity lives in places a consumer brand rarely has to think about. The first is the specimen: a printed or on-screen sheet that sets a typeface at many sizes and in running text so a designer can judge it. For a foundry, the specimen is both a sales tool and a statement of taste, and its layout, paper and paragraph choices often say as much about the house as any logo.

The second surface is the catalogue or house publication. Foundries have long issued booklets, newsletters and magazines that show their faces in use, and some of these publications became better known than the businesses behind them.

Third, the type names themselves work as brand names. A family name has to be distinct, easy to say, and able to sit in a licence agreement, a menu in a design app and a credit line.

Finally, the digital storefront carries the identity day to day: licensing pages, type testers and downloadable trial fonts are where most people now meet a foundry, so their typography, tone and terms form part of the brand.

From bitmaps to revivals.

Emigre’s typefaces are its products and its vocabulary, and their dates trace the foundry’s path. Wikipedia lists Licko’s Modula and Lo-Res from 1985, Matrix from 1986, and Triplex Italic by John Downer from 1985. Rubinstein’s Eye profile adds Citizen, made in 1986 to approximate the smoother output of the new laser printers.

Screen type came back in the mid-1990s. According to Eye, Base-9 and Base-12 began in 1995 as screen fonts for Emigre’s website and then gained a companion printer font. Wikipedia dates Base Monospace to 1997 and Base 900 to 2010.

The revivals mark a turn. Licko told Eye that her interest in reviving classic faces began in 1995, prompted by more capable personal computers and by the magazine’s move towards theory, which called for text faces that could set long essays. Mrs Eaves, based on Baskerville, and Filosofia, based on Bodoni, are both dated 1996 by Wikipedia. Licko said that working on Filosofia helped her understand Bodoni better, and that the scrutiny gave her ideas for faces that are not strict revivals, naming Tarzana and Solex. Wikipedia lists later extensions, including Mrs Eaves XL in 2009 and Filosofia Parma in 2019.

The library was never Licko’s alone. The Eye profile names Barry Deck, Jonathan Barnbrook, Frank Heine and Rodrigo Cavazos among the designers whose faces Emigre offered in 2002. Wikipedia’s list of the families MoMA acquired in 2011 includes Deck’s Template Gothic and Barnbrook’s Mason Serif.

The names themselves carry the brand. Emigre’s own page for Mrs Eaves says the face is named after Sarah Eaves, John Baskerville’s live-in housekeeper, whom he later married, and that Baskerville designed his type in Birmingham in 1757. The same page describes Mrs Eaves as Licko’s attempt at a traditional typeface, and the foundry has since extended the name to related families such as Mr Eaves.

For a design guide, Emigre shows how a house publication can work as specimen, catalogue and argument at once, so that readers meet a typeface in use before they meet it for sale. Compare Font Bureau and Hoefler&Co., two other American foundries in this collection. For this guide we use press red, oxblood and newsprint with a transitional serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Emigre’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.