Emigre Fonts: Type Specimens 1986-2024, A Compendium
RuRudy VanderLans (Ed.), Jeffery Keedy (Intro), Stephen Coles (Foreword)
Letterform Archive, 2025
€89,00
A 1,500-page compendium containing nearly five decades of remarkable print ephemera from a trailblazing digital type foundry.
Emigre is a graphic design and digital type foundry based in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1985 by the husband-and-wife team Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, it was one of the first independent digital type foundries to explore the new design possibilities offered by the MacIntosh computer. It is also known for its legendary design magazine, Emigre, which was a quarterly magazine published between 1984 and 2005.
To announce each of its new typeface releases, Emigre published small booklets displaying the virtues of its fonts and revealing the processes used to design them. More than simple sales tools, these type specimens were enjoyed as much for their inventive contents and layouts as for their innovative typeface designs. In 2016, Emigre published the first 18 years of these type specimens in a single book, spanning 1986–2004.
This volume reissues the popular contents of the 2016 title (now out of print) and picks up where it left off, combining those first 18 years of materials with additional materials from Emigre’s archive, covering 2004 to the present. The result is a massive 1,500-page reference providing a definitive and up-to-date collection of the foundry’s remarkable print ephemera since its inception.
What made Emigre unique as a foundry is that they were among the very first to use the Mac—a new tool made for graphic designers—to create original typefaces rather than doing the safe thing that established companies were doing at the time: simply digitizing the old metal classics. In fact, the ability to draw fonts on-screen came along at just the right time for Licko, who sidestepped calligraphic tradition, embraced the constraints of the pixel grid, and made type that was entirely new.
What also makes VanderLans and Licko the perfect design pair is that he is as adept at using typefaces as she is at making them. Most specimens in this book were designed by VanderLans. He showcases his partner’s fonts in a way that both demonstrates their utility and makes them objects of desire. His clear layouts—removed from the more radical compositions of Emigre magazine’s early years—are combined with lucid writing, always informative and often dryly funny. The specimens also vary in approach, with Crackly (2019) and Tally (2022) providing examples of how the couple worked their individual hobbies—pattern design and travel photography—into catalog concepts. While most type specimens present new releases, this compilation covers a period when Emigre issued many booklets revisiting their back catalog. It shows the versatility and perennial relevance of the type they chose to publish, both internally and from a long list of forward-thinking designers. Like any good specimen, it’s a snapshot of type and design history, and an invitation to reimagine what each typeface can do today.
ISBN: 9798989142361
