Concept

Emigre Fonts

Summary
Emigre, Inc., doing business as Emigre Fonts, is a digital type foundry based in Berkeley, California, that was founded in 1985 by husband-and-wife team Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko. The type foundry grew out of Emigre magazine, a publication founded by VanderLans and two Dutch friends who met in San Francisco, CA in 1984. Note that unlike the word émigré, Emigre is officially spelled without accents. Emigre Fonts was founded as an independent foundry in 1985 quickly following the release of the first issue of Emigre magazine in 1984. In a 2002 interview with Rhonda Rubinstein for Eye Magazine, Licko recalled the early days of her type design and the important relationship between the magazine and the foundry: “When I started building Macintosh bitmap fonts in 1984, it was a purely experimental endeavour. I didn’t have a client for these fonts, nor did I plan to start a type foundry. It was Emigre magazine that opened up these options. Rudy had started it (with two Dutch artists) as a showcase for émigré artists. Issue #3 was the turning point for my typeface experiments and for the magazine, as it was typeset entirely using my first Lo-Res fonts. We had a lot of inquiries about the availability of these typefaces that no one had seen before. It was the start of Emigre Fonts."Coinciding with the advent of the Macintosh computer, Emigre took advantage of the new medium to design digital typefaces without requiring the equipment or manufacturing infrastructure of a traditional type foundry. Rather than adhering to the aesthetics of metal type optimized for letterpress printing, Licko began designing fonts that embraced the limitations of bitmap graphics endemic to early PCs and the idiosyncrasies of dot matrix printing. Robin Kinross analyzed these fonts in a 1992 article for Eye Magazine: "The early productions were rationalised by reference to the requirements of low-memory computing and low-resolution screen display and printer output, and show considerate ingenuity in juggling with a heavily reduced formal repertoire, to make coherent sets of characters.
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