Zuzana Licko (1961) was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia and emigrated with her parents to the U.S. in 1968. She graduated with a degree in Graphic Communications from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984.
Rudy VanderLans (1955) is a Dutch type and graphic designer and the co-founder of Emigre, an independent type foundry, with Czechoslovakian-born designer Zuzana Licko.
VanderLans studied at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. Later, he moved to California and studied photography at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1984, VanderLans, with his wife Zuzana Licko, founded Emigre and began to publish Emigre magazine, a journal for experimental graphic design.
After the release of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, VanderLans and Licko were inspired to design custom fonts that the Macintosh was lacking, resulting in the Emigre Graphics font library, arguably the most trendsetting type collection of the early digital era. V
Together, Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko started the design company Emigre Graphics in 1984. The company became world renowned for its self-published magazine and type foundry which were greatly inspired by the new technical possibilities offered by the introduction of the Macintosh computer. Licko and VanderLans became early adopters to the new technology and they used the computer to experiment and created some of the very first typeface designs and digital page layouts causing great consternation within the realm of graphic design. Eventually, exposure of the typefaces in Emigre magazine resulted in demand for the fonts which lead to the creation of the Emigre Type foundry. This growing library of digital typefaces, both experimental and traditional, is currently the principle activity and mainstay of Emigre.
As a team, Emigre has been honored with numerous awards including the 1994 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and the 1998 Charles Nypels Award for excellence in the field of typography. Emigre is also a recipient of the 1997 American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal Award, its highest honors. In October 2010 the Emigre team was inducted as Honorary members of the Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago, and in 2016 they traveled to New York to receive the 29th Type Directors Club Medal.
Licko is the recipient of an honorary Ph.D degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (2005), and she received the 2013 Typography Award from the Society of Typographic Aficionados.
In 2011, five digital typefaces from the Emigre Type Library were acquired by MoMA New York for their design and architecture collection.
© 2025. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Zuzana Licko, Rudy VanderLans, Emigre Type or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only
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| Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko |
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| Vorm Vijf, 1978 |
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| Total Design, 1978 |
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| Talk Talk Talk, lecture announcement, 1989 poster |
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| Emigre #1, 1984, cover |
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| Emigre #2, The Magazine That Ignores Boundaries, 1985 cover |
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| Emigre #11, 1989, cover |
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| Emigre #13, page spread, 1989 illustration by John Weber |
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| Emigre #14, Heritage, 1990 |
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| Emigre #17, 1991 cover |
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| Emigre #19, 1991 cover |
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| Emigre #24, 1992 cover |
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| Emigre #38, The Authentic Issue, 1996 cover |
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| Emigre #40, The Info Perplex, 1996 cover |
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| Emigre #43, 1997 page spread |
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| Emigre #49, The Everything is for Sale Issue, 1999 cover |
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| Emigre #55, The Leisure Time Issue, 2000 cover |
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| Emigre #60, 2001 cover |
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| Emigre #62, 2002 cover |
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| Emigre, # 69, 2005 cover |
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| One of the few hand-drawn type sketches in Emigre’s archive, circa 1985 |
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| Lunatix, 1988, typeface |
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| Variex, 1998 typeface |
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| Dogma, 1994 typeface |
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| Base 9 & 12, 1995 typeface |
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| Base 9 & 12, 1995 typeface |
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| Modula Round & Ribbed, 1995 typeface |
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| Hypnopaedia, 1997 typeface |
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| Tangly, 2018 |
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| Crackly, 2019 typeface |
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| Littlebit, 2022 typeface |
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| Littlebit, 2022 typeface |
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| Littlebit, 2022 typeface |
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