Zuzana Licko: Emigre Design Analysis

In 1961, Zuzana Licko was bron in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. She became a United States citizen when she was a child when he family relocated to San Francisco. Licko stayed in the Bay Area when she headed off to college to study at the Univeristy of California at Berkeley. She orginally was enrolled to study architecture but changed to graphic communications after a caligraphy class. Licko and her husband, Rudy VanderLans, founded a magazine named Emigre. This magazine was used as a median to showcase new fonts and to reach out to other designers who wanted to use the creative duo’s fonts. The team jumped on board when Macitosh computers hit the market in 1984. In an article from Emigre in 1989, Licko describes the new tasks that type designers face with advanced techinology. She saw the advancement with computers as a way to create seamless production and be in more creative control. Computers let designers become their own publisher, writer, illustrator, and designer which allowed for a flowing continuum of activity, which Licko described that this is similar to the creative
Eaves and Filosofia. Licko was deeply inspired by Bononi. Giambattista Bodoni was a designer in the late eighteenth century who followed typer principles made by another previous typesetter, John Baskerville. Licko was inspired by Bondoni’s designs but saw flaws in his work. She went on to create Filosofia was created with a great importance on geometry and symmetry. Licko added her own flare like rounded serif endings to help ease the contrast when formatting long boxes of small text. Mrs. Eaves is another typeface with elements of Bononi and Backerville kept in mind. This is often seen as her most famous serif font. In 1994, Licko and VanderLans won the Chrysler Design Award. Licko became world famous for her twist on traditional fonts with a modern flare. She is still alive today and currently still in San Francisco working for