Women in Design:
Zuzana Licko
We know that advances in technology and accessibility affect type design. In the past, only a handful of designers could conquer both hurdles in order to create new type systems. Even fewer of these designers were women. Zuzana Licko was one of them.
Born in former Czechoslovakia, Licko immigrated to Berkeley as a child where her mathematician father gave her access to computers. When Licko purchased the newly commercially available Macintosh, she used public domain software to program bitmap fonts at a time where desktop publishing itself was a new frontier. Her typefaces were postmodern in nature that challenged the still dominant Modernist sensibility and, at times, legibility itself. Licko created a range of typefaces from 2-bit type to historic serifs to ornamental flourishes.
In 1985, Licko and Rudy VanderLans started Emigre magazine (“The Magazine that Ignores Boundaries”) to promote the type foundry. The magazine became a vehicle that challenged the design community and paved the way for designers to become typographers. Emigre Magazine catalogs have been a huge influence on type and design today.
Emigre (fonts are still being sold there): https://www.emigre.com/
Issue no. 11 at Letterform Archive: https://lnkd.in/g69APhyW
Check out the other Women in Design features in our series: Bobby Solomon and Tomoko Miho.
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