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5.
The disruptors of dogmas:
Jean-Baptiste Levée on the liberating role of Emigre
During the 20th century, the profession of type designer demanded a vast skill set that included calligraphy, stone-cutting and drawing. The invention and popularization of personal computers in the 1990s made it much easier to produce typefaces, yet the professional community was still holding firm to established dogmas.
The role of disruptor was played by the American duo Emigre, who paired up their talent with digital technology to run one of the first independent digital font foundries that successfully competed with big industry players. Type designer Jean-Baptiste Levée talks about his love-hate attitude to the duo’s work and their freeing and reformative role.
(since 1980s)
California-based design duo Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko. The couple is renowned for their pioneering use of digital fonts and for Emigre magazine, one of the most influential graphic design publications of the 1980s and ’90s. In 2016 Emigre was awarded a TDC Medal.
Navigating between love and hate
I'm a French type designer who was trained in French public schools in the early 2000s. My graphic design teachers were all Frenchmen who were themselves young, active design professionals during the 1990s. This was the zenith of the Emigre era: back then, they were hugely influential beyond the Anglo-Saxon world. My teachers put me in touch with the Emigre body of work, emphasizing how fresh and rule-breaking it was and continues to be.
When I switched to specialized typeface design studies, teachers leaned towards the opposite point of view with Emigre, calling their digital typefaces and layouts badly drawn, not very crafty and illegible. I had difficulties forming my own opinion, whether it was admiration or to move away from that work. I really navigated back and forth between these two feelings.
Page spread from Emigre magazine, issue No. 24 called Neomania, 1992.
Competing with big players from the underground
In the 1990s, Emigre were the young punk kids—the cool and fashionable ones. They managed to disrupt the dogmas and reform the typographic trade to make it more open. Prior to Emigre, it was widely thought that a typographer had to be skilled in calligraphy and drawing. However, Zuzana Licko once stated that her greatest accomplishment as a typographer was being able to design functional and desirable typefaces without mastering calligraphy, which she was taught was impossible. In this way, Emigre opened the door to typography for many designers.
Cover Story No. 4, digital pigment print published by Gallery 16, 2009.
Continuing on the path
In 2014, I started my own independent type foundry Production Type as a one-person business. The list of skills required to start such a business is pretty lengthy: you have to be good at design, photography, web publishing, accounting, marketing, Photoshop and video editing—the list is never ending. I studied many of them, but can’t say that I’m really great with all of them.
Thinking of the example of Emigre, I really believe distantly-related skills aren’t as crucial as people think, and just raise the bar. Emigre showed us that two people can run an independent type foundry with just a computer and internet access.
They demonstrated that even such a small team can be innovative and successfully compete on the market. So, knowing about these cool kids is a plus. Today, my business—Production Type—remains a small business of seven people based in Paris and Shanghai.
Page spread of Program type specimen, 2013.
