Representatives of Letterforms: Zuzana Licko

ZUZANA LICKO:

Zuzana Licko was born in Czechoslovakia, and has a degree in graphic

communications from the University of California at Berkley, she has had no formal training in typeface design, and no experience in digital produced and designed type. Regardless, Licko developed her own unique bitmap fonts, which were introduced at the same time as the Macintosh and the publication of Emigre in 1984. With her husband, Rudy VanderLans, Licko had founded Emigre magazine,which exposed her typeface designs and eventually evolved into the manufacture of Emigre fonts. Some of Licko's innovative designs were Emperor,Oakland, and Universal, which are now combined and 're-mastered' as Lo-Res. As type development and rendering technologies improved, Licko was able to design smoother and more traditional type designs such as Citizen, Triplex,Matrix,and Senator, all of which descended from her first designs.

Licko's typeface designs became increasingly less restricted by technology in the 1990s and allowed her to experiment with scale and flexibility, which can be seen in Narly and Variex. Licko also experimented in designing typefaces that were revivals of two classic designs,Baskerville and Bodoni, resulting in Mrs. Eaves and Filosofia in 1996. Licko has designed nearly 30 different type families, all of which are diverse. Some of her well known typefaces are Solex and Tarzana, which are sans serifs, blackletters like Totally Gothic and Totally Glyphic, and Hypopeadia, which features swirling patterns.

I personally was drawn to Licko's typefaces because of her type design 'Fairplex,' which was created in 2002.