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
From 1984 to 2005, VanderLans published, edited, and designed Emigre magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to visual communication. Shortly after Emigre magazine was launched, in 1984, the Macintosh computer was introduced. VanderLans, together with his wife, Zuzana Licko, became early adaptors of the new technology and they used the computer to experiment and created some of the very first digital layouts and typeface designs, causing great consternation within the realm of graphic design. Eventually, exposure of the typefaces in Emigre magazine resulted in demand for the fonts, which led to the creation of the Emigre type foundry. This growing library of digital typefaces, both experimental and traditional, is currently the principal activity and mainstay of Emigre.
As a parallel interest to his design ventures, VanderLans has been photographing the California environment since he moved there from the Netherlands in 1981. He has authored a total of six photographic books on the topic.
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 honor. In October 2010 the Emigre team members were inducted as Honorary Members of the Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago. VanderLans is the recipient of honorary Ph.D. degrees from both the Rhode Island School of Design (2005) and the California Institute of the Arts (2006).
Complete sets of Emigre magazine are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, The Bancroft Library, and many other institutions around the world. In 2011, five digital typefaces from the Emigre Type Library were acquired by MoMA, New York for its Design and Architecture collection.
© 2019. All images are copyrighted © by Rudy VanderLans or Emigree. 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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| Mr Rudy VanderLans |
