Long Live Emigre! The Magazine “Emigre” Is Dead!

After many years of publishing, Emigre magazine is calling it quits. I first learned about Emigre when I was a budding web designer at CMP Media in the mid 1990s. My colleague introduced me to “this really cool design magazine” called Emigre, and from the first look I was hooked on the concept. Emigre is a type foundry based in Berkeley, California, where Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko have influenced the graphic design world for years, introducing stylish new typefaces and publishing the sometimes cryptic magazine Emigre.

The magazine has had many forms since it began in 1984. For a long time, it was a fairly pedestrian 8.5x11 inch rag, but then it became a cardboard folder with a CD and a booklet, and then it became something like a paperback book with nothing but text in it. At first it was free, then it was free if you ordered something from them, then it you had to pay for a subscription to the 4 issues per year. It's been interesting to watch the progression of design of the magazine, of the overall concept, and of the ideas presented within — as well as to watch what fine typefaces came out under their brand.

I really started to be intrigued by Emigre when their head honcho, Rudy VanderLans, began publishing photographs of his desert road trips, first in a series of magazine issues and then in a series of books: Palm Desert, Cucomonga, Joshua Tree, and Supermarket. VanderLans is not your typical photographer; his photographs are those of the interested amateur, apparently taken with an ordinary 35mm camera and not a medium or large format negative camera, as is often the case with landscape photography that aspires to “art.”

Below: pages from VanderLans's book “Supermarket.”

Like me, VanderLans moved to California from a far away place (he came from the Netherlands, considerably farther than my own homeland of Connecticut). He went to U.C. Berkeley where he studied photography. He founded Emigre in 1984 and went on to influence the world of graphic design. I moved to California in 1984, studied geography at Berkeley and graduated in 1995, and influenced precisely nothing, but still, I've enjoyed the contributions of Mr. VanderLans to the world of design and photography.

So it's with sadness that I learn, through the last issue of Emigre, #69, of the end of the magazine.