Hot Type Redefined

Let us ponder the letter “a.” And, for that matter, its 25 next-door neighbors, not to mention commas, periods, ampersands, dollar signs, colons, semicolons and dashes--in other words, the primordial alphabet soup that you, dear reader, are swimming in right here on this page. Let us also consider the millions of other letters, of all shapes and sizes, that make up this Chihuahua-killer of a Sunday paper. Seen--and yet not seen.

It’s the enigma, the weird mystery of typography--and of typographers. Because someone, possibly dead five centuries, maybe living a block or two away, has actually designed each one of these letter forms. Agonized, perhaps for years, over the precise bend of the top curlicue of the letter “a,” deciding whether to end it with a little round knob or a sharp wedge. You get the idea.

As if that’s not enough, the type designer faces a challenge: how to create a distinct font (as the alphabet is called in the trade’s hermetic lingo), yet a font that will, essentially, disappear into the content. Such was the conventional wisdom among the elite who designed type--from Johann Gutenberg to William Caslon to Giambattista Bodoni to Frederic William Goudy--until . . . well, 1984.

If there is a point of singularity for the end of that 500-year status quo, it might be the moment that year in Berkeley when a pair of young designers named Rudy VanderLans (a recent immigrant from Holland) and his wife, Zuzana Licko (from Slovakia), decided to publish a magazine. They called it Emigre.

VanderLans dug $1,500 out of savings and printed 500 copies. By the ruthless economics of magazine publishing, their venture should have died on the spot. But something happened. Technology struck.

“We had this machine, this Macintosh,” VanderLans recalls. “We bought it for $900, and then noticed that it could allow us to set our own type. And the bonus on top of that, you could make your own typefaces.”

It

started a chain of events that changed the lives of these two emigres, changed the face of their craft forever, created a little company with an immense impact--and also posed a new set of challenges, and perhaps threats, to two innocent computer tinkerers. It was the typographic equivalent of the cosmic Big Bang.

the influence of the computer spread relentlessly through the ever-expanding type-design universe.

“What happened is that we put out our magazine and designers started seeing these funky fonts we were doing on this crazy little Macintosh computer,” says VanderLans. Adds Licko: “There was a vacuum--ideas were possible that weren’t possible before.”

The original Licko (pronounced Litch-ko) fonts were greatly limited by the crude computer-printer technology of the day--each character was a “bitmap,” a stack of itty-bitty black boxes (called pixels) arranged in a grid. “OK, so if you limit yourself to a little grid of five-by-seven [pixels],” says Licko, “and you have 35 little pixels, how do you make a letter out of that? It was just a little game at that point.”

Her “game” yielded a handful of notched new typefaces--Coarse Resolution, Oakland, Emperor and Universal, all in 1985. They were undeniably crude, but also brash and very cool.

Designers couldn’t wait to get their hands on them. Licko and VanderLans, almost as an afterthought, started publishing them--tossing off copies on cheap 3.5-inch floppy discs. Technology quickly caught up with typography: Adobe’s new PostScript software allowed letters to become subtle sets of smooth mathematical curves; dot-matrix printers were made obsolete by laser printers. Now the little black boxes were almost microscopic. Software allowed designers to draw letters quickly, then test them without “a gazillion Xeroxes pasted together,” as one typographer put it.

The result was a torrent (by typographic standards) of new typefaces from Licko: Modula, Citizen and Matrix in 1986. “I love the building-block approach,” says Licko. So she designed typefaces almost like Lego toys, with “modular” elements easily snapped together.

That approach broke all kinds of traditional rules--typographers, after all, often labored for years to create differences between letters in a font. For example, every font has a “base line,” like the thin blue line in a child’s tablet. But in traditional fonts, not all letters sit on top of that line: some protrude just a smidge below it to make a sophisticated optical correction--sort of like the ancient Greeks slightly bowing columns to make them appear straight. Licko’s letters sat uniformly on that base line. The letter “o” might be recycled to become the round part of the “p” or the “d.” Over the span of four years, Licko cranked out nine more fonts--from Lunatix to Totally Gothic.

VanderLans deployed them in Emigre magazine in startling new ways, aided by the revolution in computerized desktop publishing that allowed designers to move things around with giddy abandon, cramming, jamming, overprinting, skewing, slanting, distorting.

“All of a sudden,” says VanderLans, “it exploded. And we got to know this whole group of people. They came out of the woodwork--”

Adds Licko (after 19 years of marriage, they have a way of completing one another’s sentences): “Remedy was the second typeface we released. That came totally out of the blue. It just came in the mail--”

“Done by a German, of all people,” says VanderLans.

“And he’s extremely precise,” says Licko. “This kind of hand-drawn [look] doesn’t go with that aesthetic.”

Remedy looks like the doodlings of someone in a rubber room: the letters are itchy, crude, obsessive. If fonts are supposed to start with exquisitely hand-drawn calligraphy (another rule Licko happily disregards), this was lettering drawn with a Crayola in a very unsteady hand. Yet, weirdly enough, the font sold.

“When that started happening,” says VanderLans, “there were very few outlets to take these fonts. Adobe wasn’t interested in doing that kind of stuff--”

“But now they are!” says Licko.

“Remedy has been a great inspiration to many people,” continues VanderLans with a laugh. “At that time, I don’t think we were thinking, ‘This is going to be huge.’ Especially when people were saying, ‘God, this really looks ugly.’ ”

Emigre was producing fonts that, at first sight, looked ungainly, willfully illegible, downright obnoxious in an in-your-face way. There were details in some of Licko’s fonts that would curl a typographer’s toes--check out the fish-hook tail on the letter “g” in Matrix or the funky Felix-the-Cat-clock tail of the “g” in Lunatix Light.

“Zuzana’s work has almost, like, a vernacular quality to it,” says VanderLans. “Because she is not steeped in the traditions of, you know, type design. So she’s adding this kind of vernacular, non-educated twist to it, sort of self-taught. I’m looking for another word and it’s just escaping me.”

Licko laughs. “Amateurish?”

But then the Emigre fonts escaped; they began popping up on CD covers, in near-mainstream publications, in ads for Nike shoes and Cadillacs. Suddenly, the kids from Berkeley were on the map.

“Emigre was an extremely popular magazine,” says typographer Jim Parkinson, whose laundry list of fonts and logos includes the Rolling Stone and Newsweek magazine mastheads. “There was a time when it was state of the art. There wasn’t a graphic designer who didn’t have a subscription to Emigre. It had an enormous impact [on font design]. They were very nontraditional. They had a style that appealed to younger designers and to a youth market. Type and typography have so many facets. There’s book typography and newspaper typefaces, advertising typefaces, display, text, all kinds of things, and many of them are based on classic forms. Emigre kind of tossed a lot of that out the window.”

the new york design priesthood’s reaction was swift and savage. mobil Oil logo designer Massimo Vignelli denounced Emigre’s fonts as garbage, lacking depth, refinement, elegance or a sense of history. Type critic Steven Heller lashed the movement in a 1993 article called “The Cult of the Ugly.”

Licko responded with cool understatement: “The personal computer has given virtually equal design opportunities to laypeople and professionals alike.”

Bay Area designer Chuck Byrne put it more bluntly: “In the last 50 years or so, making a reputation for yourself was basically a process of winning competitions, getting your work published and going around pontificating to the world about how great you are. What drove the establishment crazy was that Rudy and Zuzana totally short-circuited this apprenticeship and became famous simply by designing for this international group of admirers.”

Today, if one is literate and reasonably well-read, it is hard to avoid reading an Emigre font. It was as if the revolutionaries had broken into the palace of typography and were now sitting in the big chairs, their former foes relegated to the shadows. In fact, a year ago, arch-critic Vignelli designed a direct-mail poster using Filosophia, a new Emigre font drawn by Licko.

The duo now have a thriving business, selling fonts as well as a diversified line that includes music, books, posters and even pajamas. They give their magazine away for free to anyone with any tenuous connection to the design game; circulation is around 45,000. It pays for itself by peddling Emigre’s fonts.

Emigre’s main office is tucked away in a leafy, non-cutting-edge residential neighborhood in Sacramento. VanderLans and Licko started the business in Berkeley, then pulled stakes to find cheaper digs. The Bay Area lured them back, but they left the business operation in Sacramento. They now commute one day a week to the office, which is otherwise run by Tom Starback, their sales manager, whom VanderLans calls “the third leg of the stool.”

“We’re not Steve Jobs, that’s for sure, but we live a comfortable life,” says VanderLans. The home he shares with Licko is a couple of blocks from Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse restaurant. After rising at 7 a.m., their commute is a flight of stairs to their separate offices. They collaborate, in a manner of speaking: “Oftentimes I use [Rudy] as a contrary indicator,” says Licko. “Like, I’ll ask him, ‘Which of these three would you choose?’ And I’ll say, ‘OK, that’s not what I’m using.’ ”

They take afternoon breaks for walks and socializing--that’s something new, says VanderLans. Emigre’s first 10 years “ruined our social life because it’s all we did.”

Maybe because they are emigres, they somehow managed to miss the American preoccupation with big-bigger-biggest. “We’ve really pushed the envelope, design-wise,” says VanderLans, “[but] business-wise we are very chicken. We could have done the other thing, as many design studios would have done, just said, ‘Let’s hire five or 10 designers and take on all these jobs that are coming to us.’ But that didn’t seem to be our thing at all because we didn’t want to become managers. We’re very hands-on people. Zuzana still designs our typefaces. I’m still involved in my magazine. We enjoy that. So I guess we’ve kept the stakes low for ourselves, which has worked just perfectly fine.”

Along the way, there have been assorted typography awards, although there are still screams--muffled, of course--from design pros, enough to prompt VanderLans to retort on Emigre’s Web site (www.emigre.com) that new fonts and designs, “like anything subversive, eventually gets decoded and co-opted by the mainstream.”

and therein lies the new challenge. Post-Licko, type is something we regard as casually as this year’s hemline; type is flippant, fun, perishable. Here today, gone tomorrow.

See the beginnings of a crisis for our revolutionaries? When type becomes fashion . . . well, just ask Tommy Hilfiger about that. VanderLans laughs at the conundrum he calls “the million-dollar question”--where to next?

“You can’t hang around for very long and be a top player because you’ll just outdate yourself style-wise,” he says. “And that’s something that the outside world will have to tell me is true or not-- whether we had our peak and we’re now totally old hat.”

VanderLans has published a new book of his photography (“Supermarket,” Gingko Press). Emigre is still releasing challenging fonts: its latest, Dalliance, is from Frank Heine, the German who tossed Remedy over Emigre’s transom in 1992. Emigre’s hottest font right now is a Licko creation called Mrs. Eaves. It’s Licko’s restatement of a typeface called Baskerville, cut by the great English typographer John Baskerville in the mid-1700s (Ben Franklin was said to be fond of the font).

“Baskerville’s work was severely criticized by his peers and critics throughout his lifetime and after,” Licko wrote on Emigre’s Web site. “From personal experience, I could sympathize.”

She also is revisiting some of the old bitmap fonts and tinkering with a new text face that she may call Fairplex for reasons even she’s not sure about. One gets the impression that the million-dollar question is not something that keeps VanderLans and Licko awake at night. At the ripe old age of 39 (Licko) and 46 (VanderLans), the pair have made the most perilous transition facing any revolutionary: they have survived success. They have become--dare we say it--classics.

“I’ll meet these young designers who were barely born when we started Emigre,” says VanderLans. “It’s very odd because we still sort of feel like . . . we were sort of these rebels, and people who were cultural aberrations, as Massimo Vignelli called it, so we’ve always felt like this young group of designers. Obviously, we’re not at all.” VanderLans utters this with a hearty laugh. Licko joins him. There’s not a trace of postmodern irony.

The Trucky Business of Selling Your ‘Children’

So how does this typography business work? Terribly efficiently and, as it turns out, not well at all. Call it the digital dilemma. Time was, back in so-called “hot metal” days, buying a font required installing big, heavy, expensive Linotype machines to cast the type--not to mention a big, throbbing composing room to assemble all of this weighty stuff into a form that could be printed. Price of entry: steep. Stealing type? Best done with a couple of semi-trucks.

Fast-forward: Fonts are now arrays of ones and zeros; a two- or three-minute download from a Web site or neatly compressed on a floppy disc. Most font houses (Emigre included) sell a variety of licenses that authorize use of the font on various computers and printers. An individual user is usually authorized to use the font on two computers--it’s routine for a designer to send a copy of a font to a printer. A single-user Emigre font sells for $39; the company also packages families of fonts, or “collections,” for up to $199. All things considered, it’s an amazing bargain.

This freedom of access means that just about anyone with a computer can acquire just about any font (and there are hundreds on the Web offered for free). From the designer’s point of view, this is both good and bad.

Fonts are “children,” says Chester (who eschews a last name), a designer at the Thirsttype foundry in suburban Chicago. “They really are. You give birth to them, raise them for years and then they go out and, like, hold up liquor stores.”

Typographer Jim Parkinson muses, “When you release a font, you don’t release it with an operator’s manual.”

But type-manglers are hardly the font designer’s biggest headache. Those ones and zeros are infinitely reproducible. Piracy is, according to Emigre’s Rudy VanderLans, “a huge, huge problem. We have done our own in-house, not very official research, [and] our findings are that one out of every two fonts that we see in use is obtained illegally.”

Oddly enough, many of them turn up in design annuals. “You’ve got professional designers who send in their work to these design annuals,” says VanderLans, “and they win awards, and we see the work and we call these people up and we say, ‘Listen, congratulations on winning these awards, but you’re not registered to use our font.’ I mean, we would be very wealthy people if we had gotten paid for every font that’s out there in use. I kid you not.”

VanderLans and wife Zuzana Licko sue the perps if they don’t buy a license (Emigre’s are the cheapest in the mainstream font business). They say they’ve never lost a case. Sighs VanderLans: “And the lawyers are laughing all the way to the bank.