x
Home
Search
Topics
Almanac
Science
Nature
People
History
Society
Signup
Login
HOME
TOPICS
ALMANAC
SCIENCE
NATURE
PEOPLE
HISTORY
SOCIETY
PHILOSOPHY
Zuzana Licko
Topic Home
Discussion
0
Encyclopedia
Zuzana Licko is a typeface designer based out of the San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

 who was born in Bratislava
Bratislava
Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia and, with a population of about 431,000, also the country's largest city. Bratislava is in southwestern Slovakia on both banks of the Danube River. Bordering Austria and Hungary, it is the only national capital that borders two independent countries.Bratislava...

, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

.

Licko came to the United States when she was a child along with her family. She studied architecture, photography and computer programming before earning a degree in graphic communications at the University of California at Berkeley.

In an interview featured in Eye
Eye (magazine)
Eye Magazine, The International Review of Graphic Design is a quarterly print magazine on graphic design and visual culture.- History :...

 (No. 43, Vol. 11, Spring 2002), Licko described her creative relationship with Vanderlans:

Emigre

In the mid-1980s, Zuzana Licko and husband Rudy VanderLans
Rudy VanderLans
Rudy VanderLans is a Dutch type and graphic designer and the co-founder of Emigre, an independent type foundry.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...

 founded Emigre
Emigre
Emigre, also known as Emigre Graphics, is a digital type foundry, publisher and distributor of graphic design centered information based in Berkeley, California, that was founded in 1984 by husband-and-wife team Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko. The type foundry also published Emigre magazine...

, also known as Emigre Graphics. The magazine, Emigre, was then created in 1984. This magazine http://www.emigre.com/EMagView.php designed and distributed original fonts under the direction of its editor, who was VanderLans. Licko was responsible for many successful Emigre fonts.

Zuzana was initially exposed to Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

 computers with the first release in 1984.
Apart from adding new typefaces as a form of content, Émigré was also created as a way to share the typefaces with other designers that liked and wanted to use Zuzana’s creations. As technology advanced, Zuzana moved from bitmap fonts to high resolution designs and based the newer designs on the ones initially created for dot matrix printers.
In the mid-1990s, Licko worked on two notable revivals: Mrs Eaves
Mrs Eaves
Mrs Eaves is a transitional serif typeface designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996, and licensed by Emigre, a typefoundry run by Licko and husband Rudy VanderLans...

, based on Baskerville
Baskerville
Baskerville is a transitional serif typeface designed in 1757 by John Baskerville in Birmingham, England. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, positioned between the old style typefaces of William Caslon, and the modern styles of Giambattista Bodoni and Firmin Didot.The...

, and Filosofia, based on Bodoni
Bodoni
-Cold Type versions:As it had been a standard type for many years, Bodoni was widely available in cold type. Alphatype, Autologic, Berthold, Compugraphic, Dymo, Harris, Mergenthaler, MGD Graphic Systems, and Varityper, Hell AG, Monotype, all sold the face under the name ‘’Bodoni, while Graphic...

. Both are Licko's personal interpretations of their historical models and each features extensive ligatures
Ligature (typography)
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms", where the specific shape of a letter depends on...

.
Mrs. Eaves was actually named after John Baskerville's lover and is also a kind of revival of Baskerville typeface but somewhat stylized. Along with ligatures Licko stylized Baskerville through the use of small caps or "petite caps".

Filosofia

Because of her admiration for Bodoni, she designed and came up with several variations of Bodoni, in the form of digital font for computer type and some forms were also used for text.
Before working with computers, Licko's favorite typeface was Bodoni with its "clean lines and geometric shapes and the variety of headline style choices." Licko avoided using Bodoni for long texts, "as the extreme contrast made it difficult to read at small sizes.’”
Bodoni influenced Licko’s work on Filosofia, one of her typefaces. Like other revivals of typefaces, Licko’s revival of Bodoni focused on geometry and symmetry. She also incorporated things like slightly rounded serif endings.
Licko’s Filosofia was also designed to be modified to either be used on text or on a computer. There is a “Regular” version of the Filosofia family which is designed to be used on text.
The Filosofia Grand is designed for display applications and is described as more refined and delicate. To create Filosofia, Licko studied different styles of Bodoni, including the original print work and recent revivals, such as ITC Bodoni.
Although the samples of Bodoni did have an influence on her work, Licko instead recreated Bodoni with her mind, judging by eye to keep the original measurements.

Mrs. Eaves

In Texts on Type, Zuzana writes about her take on Bodoni and what Mrs. Eaves meant to her: “In my rendition of this classic typeface, I have addressed the highly criticized feature of sharp contrast. To a great degree, the critics were wrong; it did not prevent Baskerville from becoming assimilated as a highly legible text face, and in fact, the high contrast between stems and hairlines became became quite desireable, as is apparent in typefaces such as Bodoni, which followed in the lineage.

Awards

Zuzana and her husband, Rudy, won the Chrysler Design Award in 1994. Apart from winning this award, their work on Émigré also won the Publish magazine Impact Award in 1996. A year later, they got an American Institute for Graphic Arts Gold Medal Award. Soon after, in 1998 they were awarded the Charles Nyples Award in Innovation in Typography.

Fonts designed by Licko


Essays by Licko

  • With Rudy VanderLans
    Rudy VanderLans
    Rudy VanderLans is a Dutch type and graphic designer and the co-founder of Emigre, an independent type foundry.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...

    , Ambition/Fear, Emigre 11, edited by Rudy VanderLans
    Rudy VanderLans
    Rudy VanderLans is a Dutch type and graphic designer and the co-founder of Emigre, an independent type foundry.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...

    , 1989. http://www.emigre.com/Editorial.php?sect=1&id=19
  • Discovery by Design, Emigre 32, edited by Rudy VanderLans
    Rudy VanderLans
    Rudy VanderLans is a Dutch type and graphic designer and the co-founder of Emigre, an independent type foundry.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...

    , 1994. http://www.emigre.com/Editorial.php?sect=1&id=16
  • Ceramics and Type Design: Differently Similar, online at the Emigre website. Undated. http://www.emigre.com/CType.php

See also

  • List of AIGA medalists
  • List of Eye magazine issues
  • First Things First 2000 manifesto
    First things first 2000 Manifesto
    The First Things First 2000 manifesto, launched by Adbusters magazine in 1999, was an updated version of the earlier First Things First manifesto written and published in 1964 by Ken Garland, a British designer....

  • Emigre
    Emigre magazine
    Emigre was a graphic design magazine published by Emigre Graphics between 1984 and 2005; it was first published in 1984 in San Francisco, California, USA...

     51: First Things First, 1999. http://www.emigre.com/EMag.php?issue=51

External links

  • Interview with Licko at emigre.com
  • http://www.emigre.com
  • http://kevinpedia.com/lickos_lab/work.php
  • http://www.aiga.org/medalist-zuzanalickoandrudyvanderlans/
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AIGA_medalists
  • http://www.emigre.com/fonts.php
  • http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A30188&page_number=5&template_id=1&sort_order=1
  • http://www.printmag.com/article/Design-Couples-Rudy-Vanderlans-and-Zuzana-Licko
  • http://fontfeed.com/archives/an-interview-with-zuzana-licko/
  • http://www.chrysler.com/design/design_influences/design_awards/1994/zlicko.html#
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Emigre_magazines
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
Silverdale Interactive © 2024. All Rights Reserved.
 
x
OK