Monday, July 13, 2009






Zuzana Licko

Zuzana Licko is the co-founder of Émigré, together with her husband Rudy VanderLans.
Licko was born in 1961 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia and emigrated to the U.S. in 1968. She graduated with a degree in Graphic Communications from the university of California at Berkeley in 1984.
Émigré magazine was founded in 1984 and garnered much critical acclaim when it began to incorporate Licko’s digital typeface designs created with the first generation of the Macintosh computer. This exposure of her typefaces in Émigré now distributes as software, worldwide.

Eye Magazine ( UK) Published in 2002.
Interviewed by Rhonda Rubinstein.
As one of the first type designers to exploit the potential of the Apple Macintosh in it’s pre- designer days, Zuzana Licko transformed the pixel from low- resolution imitation to high-style original.
Her early Émigré fonts not only revolutionized digital typography but also opened up the market for the smaller foundries whose quarter-page ads populate today’s design magazines. She has designed more than two dozen typeface families and overseas the Émigré foundry, which currently offers 300 or so typefaces by the likes of Barry Deck, Jonathan Barnbrook, Frank Heine and Rodrigo Cavazos.