Zuzana Licko

Zuzana Licko (born Zuzana Ličko, 1961) is a Slovak-born American type designer and visual artist known for co-founding Emigre Fonts, a digital type foundry in Berkeley, CA. She has designed and produced numerous digital typefaces including the popular Mrs Eaves, Modula, Filosofia, and Matrix. In 1997, Licko was awarded the AIGA Medal for her contributions to American graphic design.

As a corresponding interest she also creates ceramic sculptures and jacquard weavings.

Early life Licko was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia and came to the United States with her family aged 7.

Licko was introduced to computers by her father, a biomathematician at the University of California, San Francisco. She would help him with data processing during her summer breaks. The first font she created on a computer was a Greek alphabet, adapted for the pen plotter, which her father used on his graph printouts.

When she started her university education, her goal was to earn a degree in architecture, but she changed to a visual studies major when she discovered her passion after taking graphic design and typography classes.

Emigre In 1985, Licko and VanderLans started Emigre Graphics which had grown out of Emigre magazine, a publication co-founded by VanderLans and two Dutch friends the previous year. VanderLans also started incorporating the bitmap typefaces that Licko designed on the Apple Macintosh in his layouts with issue # 2. Licko's experimental type designs became a prominent feature of the magazine for its entire run. Licko began selling commercial licenses of its digital fonts to users worldwide, first under the name Emigre Graphics and later as Emigre Fonts.

Emigre magazine prominently featured Licko's fonts, some of which were initially created for use in the publication. The magazine is an unintentional archive of Licko's work and progression as a type designer. From her pixelated fonts optimized for bitmap printing to her sophisticated vector designs, Licko's technique advanced with technology. In Emigre: Graphic Design into the Digital Realm, Licko discusses her necessary departure from classic type forms in her early fonts. I started my venture with bitmap type designs, created for the coarse resolutions of the computer screen and dot matrix printer. The challenge was that because the early computers were so limited in what they could do you really had to design something special. Even if it was difficult to adapt calligraphy to lead and later lead to photo technology, it could be done, but it was physically impossible to adapt 8-point Goudy Old Style to 72 dots to the inch. In the end you couldn't tell Goudy Old Style from Times Roman or any other serif text face.

Fonts designed by Licko

Bitmaps: Emperor, Universal, Oakland and Emigre, 1985, re-released as Lo-Res, 2001 Modula, 1985 Citizen, 1986 Matrix (typeface), 1986, re-released as Matrix II, 2007 Variex, 1988 (collaboration with Rudy VanderLans) Oblong, 1988 (collaboration with Rudy VanderLans) Senator, 1988 Lunatix, 1988 Elektrix, 1989 Triplex (typeface), 1989, Condensed added in 1991 Totally Gothic, 1990 Journal, 1990 Whirligig, 1994 Dogma, 1994 Modula Round, Outlined & Ribbed, 1995 Soda Script, 1995 Base Nine and Twelve, 1995 Mrs Eaves, 1996, based on the 18th century designs of John Baskerville Filosofia and Filosofia Grand, 1996 Base Monospace, 1997 Hypnopaedia, 1997 Tarzana, 1998 Solex, 2000 Fairplex, 2002 Puzzler, 2005 Mrs Eaves XL Serif, 2009 Mr Eaves Sans, 2009 Mr Eaves XL Sans, 2009 Base 900, 2010 Program, 2013 Tangly, 2018 Crackly, 2019

Essays by Licko Ambition/Fear, Emigre 11, with Rudy VanderLans, 1989. Discovery by Design, Emigre 32, edited by Rudy VanderLans, 1994. Ceramics and Type Design: Differently Similar, online at the Emigre website. Emigre: Graphic Design into the Digital Realm.

Awards Licko and her husband Rudy VanderLans won the Chrysler Design Award in 1994. Apart from winning this award, their work on Emigre 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.

The Society of Typographic Aficionados awarded Licko the 2013 SOTA Typography Award, citing her "intellectual, highly-structured approach to type design" and her contributions to the digital typography industry. MacUser Desktop Publisher of the Year Award, 1986 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, 1994 Publish Magazine Impact Awards, 1996 American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal, 1997 Charles Nypels Award for Excellence in Typography, 1998 Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco holds a complete set of Emigre magazine in their permanent collection.