Zuzana Licko


Zuzana Licko is a Slovak-born American type designer and visual artist known for co-founding Emigre Fonts, a digital type foundry in Berkeley, CA. She has designed and produced numerous digital typefaces including the popular Mrs Eaves, Modula, Filosofia, and Matrix. In 1997, Licko was awarded the AIGA Medal for her contributions to American graphic design.
As a corresponding interest she also creates ceramic sculptures and jacquard weavings.

Early life

Licko was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia and came to the United States with her family aged 7. She studied architecture, photography, and computer programming before earning a degree in graphic communications at the University of California at Berkeley.
Licko was introduced to computers by her father, a biomathematician at the University of California, San Francisco. She would help him with data processing during her summer breaks. The first font she created on a computer was a Greek alphabet, adapted for the pen plotter, which her father used on his graph printouts.
When she started her university education, her goal was to earn a degree in architecture, but she changed to a visual studies major when she discovered her passion after taking graphic design and typography classes. While at Berkeley, Licko took a calligraphy class, but struggled with it, because she was forced to write with her right hand even though she is left-handed. This experience influenced her rejection of many traditional type design practices as she started exploring the capabilities of the Macintosh computer.
In an interview featured in Eye, Licko described her creative relationship with her husband Rudy VanderLans:

Emigre

In 1985, Licko and VanderLans started Emigre Graphics which had grown out of Emigre magazine, a publication co-founded by VanderLans and two Dutch friends the previous year. VanderLans also started incorporating the bitmap typefaces that Licko designed on the Apple Macintosh in his layouts with . Licko's experimental type designs became a prominent feature of the magazine for its entire run. Licko began selling commercial licenses of its digital fonts to users worldwide, first under the name Emigre Graphics and later as Emigre Fonts.
Emigre magazine prominently featured Licko's fonts, some of which were initially created for use in the publication. The magazine is an unintentional archive of Licko's work and progression as a type designer. From her pixelated fonts optimized for bitmap printing to her sophisticated vector designs, Licko's technique advanced with technology. In Emigre: Graphic Design into the Digital Realm, Licko discusses her necessary departure from classic type forms in her early fonts.
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.
Licko has designed at least three dozen font families. In the mid-1990s, she worked on two notable revivals: Mrs Eaves and Filosofia. Updating these historical models for use both in print and on-screen, Licko included extensive ligatures with each typeface.
is not just for fonts. In recent years, Licko has turned her attention to creating ceramics and textiles under the same moniker. In a 2017 interview with Zuzana Kvetkova, Licko shares about her love of ceramics and her process:
I’ve always enjoyed creating ceramic objects, and I need this to balance out the ephemeral nature of digital work. I find that my current work on modular ceramic sculptures and fabric prints is actually an extension of type design. I’m using font software to create sketches for my ceramic sculptures, which exist of repeating elements. Each sculpture has a variety of shapes that can be combined to make different sculptures. The font software helps me go through the possible variations. The elements for the textile designs are also created as fonts, which I configure into various patterns. Perhaps my focusing on a physical medium is a reaction against everything being consumed digitally these days.

Fonts designed by Licko

  • Bitmaps: Emperor, Universal, Oakland and Emigre, 1985, re-released as , 2001
  • , 1985
  • , 1986
  • Matrix, 1986, re-released as Matrix II, 2007
  • , 1988
  • , 1988
  • , 1988
  • , 1988
  • , 1989
  • Triplex, 1989, Condensed added in 1991
  • , 1990
  • , 1990
  • , 1994
  • , 1994
  • , 1995
  • , 1995
  • , 1995
  • Mrs Eaves, 1996, based on the 18th century designs of John Baskerville
  • , 1996
  • , 1997
  • , 1997
  • , 1998
  • , 2000
  • , 2002
  • , 2005
  • , 2009
  • , 2009
  • , 2009
*
  • , 2013
  • , 2018
  • , 2019

    Essays by Licko

  • ', Emigre 11, with Rudy VanderLans, 1989.
  • ', Emigre 32, edited by Rudy VanderLans, 1994.
  • , online at the Emigre website.
  • ''Emigre: Graphic Design into the Digital Realm.''

    Awards

Licko and her husband Rudy VanderLans won the Chrysler Design Award in 1994. Apart from winning this award, their work on Emigre also won the Publish magazine Impact Award in 1996. A year later, they got an American Institute for Graphic Arts Gold Medal Award. Soon after, in 1998 they were awarded the Charles Nyples Award in Innovation in Typography.
The Society of Typographic Aficionados awarded Licko the 2013 SOTA Typography Award, citing her "intellectual, highly-structured approach to type design" and her contributions to the digital typography industry.
Solo exhibitions
General exhibitions
Permanent collections
  • Denver Art Museum holds a complete set of Emigre magazine in their permanent collection.
  • Design Museum in London holds a complete set of Emigre magazine in their permanent collection.
  • Letterform Archive holds the Emigre Archives in their permanent collection.
  • Museum für Gestaltung holds Emigre magazine issues in their permanent collection.
  • Museum of Modern Art in New York holds a complete set of Emigre magazine, and five digital fonts from the Emigre Fonts library in their permanent collection.
  • Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco holds a complete set of Emigre magazine in their permanent collection.

    Additional online resources

  • Eye, “,” by Steven Heller, 1993
  • , by Gunnar Swanson, 1994
  • 2x4, “,” by Michael Rock, 1996
  • Graphic Design USA 18. "" by Michael Dooley, 1998.
  • SpeakUp, by Armin Vit, 2002.
  • Typotheque, “,” review of Emigre #64, Rant, by Dmitri Siegel, 2004
  • Typotheque, “,” interview by David Casacuberta and Rosa Llop, 2004
  • AIGA, “,” by Steven Heller, 2004
  • , “Emigre: An Ending,” by Rick Poynor, 2005
  • TapeOp, “,” review by John Baccigaluppi, 2008
  • Eye, “,” book review by Emily King, 2009
  • Communication Arts, “,” book review by Angelynn Grant, 2009
  • Dwell, ",” book review by Miyoko Ohtake, 2009
  • Print, “,” by Steven Heller, 2009
  • Print magazine, “," interview by Caitlin Dover, 2010
  • Étapes magazine , 2010
  • Fast Company, “," by Alissa Walker, 2010.
  • MoMA, , permanent collection, 2011
  • MoMA, , permanent collection, 2011
  • The Atlantic, ",” by Steven Heller, 2012
  • Plazm Magazine, "" by Sara Dougher and Joshua Berger, 2013
  • , 2015
  • Print, “,” 2016
  • Communication Arts, “,” book review by Angelynn Grant, 2016
  • AIGA, Eye on Design, “,” book review by Angela Riechers, 2016
  • MyFonts, by Jan Middendorp, 2016.
  • Fontstand, “,” by Sébastien Morlighem, 2016
  • Klim Type Foundry, “,” Rudy vanderLans replies to “Welcome to the infill font foundry,” 2016
  • Huffington Post, “,” by Maddie Crum, 2017
  • University of Reading, “,” an exhibition curated by Francisca Monteiro and Rick Poynor, 2017
  • Typography & Graphic Communication, ",” exhibition, 2017
  • ReadyMag Stories, “,” by Zhdan Philippov and Vitaly Volk, 2020
  • “,” by Chaney Boyle, 2020