Tuesday, March 10, 2009




Zuzana Licko
"we read best what we read most"

Zuzana Licko (born 1961) is a typeface designer from Bratislava. Licko (pronounced Litchko) immigrated to the US with her family as a schoolgirl. She studied architecture, photography and computer programming before taking a degree in graphic communications at the University of California at Berkeley.
Zuzana founded the design team Emigré Design with her husband Rudy VanderLans in 1984, and together they produced the critically acclaimed Emigré journal, which included Licko's digital typeface designs. 

Emigré was originally intended as cultural journal to showcase artists, photographers, poets, and architects. VanderLans and two other Dutch immigrants put the first issue together in 1984. Since there was no budget for typesetting, the text was mostly typewriter type that had been resized on a photocopier.Working with the newly invented Macintosh computer and a bitmap font tool, Licko began creating fonts for the magazine. Emperor, Oakland, and Emigré were designed to accommodate low-resolution printer output. They were used in issue two, and, after several readers inquired about their availability, she began running ads for them in issue three. In 1985, Licko and Vanderlans launched Emigré fonts to allow them to market their own typefaces and those of other young designers.  

Some fonts designed by Licko

Lo-Res,1985                           Base Nine and Twelve, 1995
Modula, 1985                         Mrs. Eaves, 1996
Citizen, 1986                          Base Monospace, 1997.
Matrix, 1986                          Hypnomedia, 1997
Tall Pack, 1990                      Tarzana, 1998
Matrix Script, 1992               Solex, 2000
Dogma, 1994.                         Puzzler, 2005

Links
http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Graphic_Design/Typography/Typographers/Masters/Licko,_Zuzana/
http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/designer/zuzana_licko/
http://fontfeed.com/archives/an-interview-with-zuzana-licko/
www.emigre.com/

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