An EndingBy Rick Poynor
This essay was first posted in 2005 on DesignObserver. It was
republished in a slightly edited version in Icons magazine in 2006.
So it's over. One of the
great - as in all-time great - design publications has
come to a close. Issue 69 of Emigre will be
the last. Emigre the type foundry will live on, but founder,
editor and designer Rudy VanderLans has commissioned his last
article, conducted and transcribed his last interview, and
composed his final message to his readers.
And what a treat this message is.
VanderLans offers us 69 "short stories," one for
each issue, tracing the development of the magazine from its
early days as a "culturetab" through to the final
twice-yearly, book-sized issues co-published with Princeton
Architectural Press. For admirers of VanderLans'
underrated writing, it is hard to imagine a better send-off.
There is a mine of information here that will be an essential
first stop for anyone exploring the history of Emigre in the
future. As a writer, VanderLans has always managed to sound
both unassuming and wise. He has exceptionally fine judgement
and his prose is highly engaging without being ingratiating or
trying to sound like a stand-up guy. He has an ability to ask
exactly the right questions that many a full-time journalist
might envy.
For me, like many others galvanised by
graphic design during Emigre's heyday, the magazine was the most
consistently interesting design publication produced anywhere
by anyone. By 1990, it was one of those magazines you simply
had to get hold of and read straight away - back then, in
London, that meant a visit to Virgin Records in Oxford Street,
of all the unlikely places. VanderLans made no claim to be a
journalist, but his ability to focus, like a heat-seeking news
missile, on the most significant work, people and ideas was
almost uncanny. (Think of all the self-initiated zines and
visual culture mags out there and how wide of the mark most of
them are, how inessential.) VanderLans would breezily disregard
any notion of editorial balance and devote great chunks of an
issue, whole issues even, to people barely out of design
school, if he believed in the work. By focusing on these
subjects, he made them seem important. He brought tremendous
confidence and certainty in his own instincts and tastes to
everything he did. VanderLans and his rule-bending,
postmodernism-embracing, design establishment-snubbing readers
would never have used the term, but Emigre radiated authority.
The large-format issues were like no design
publication ever seen before. VanderLans conducted long
interviews in which he grilled some of the most inventive
designers of the day - Vaughan Oliver, Jeffery Keedy,
Edward Fella, P. Scott Makela, Designers Republic, David
Carson - about every facet of their work. He usually did it
first and he often did it best. His page designs were exemplary
demonstrations of the new digital design aesthetic, though the
inner classicist was never far below the surface, and he
lab-tested controversial digital typefaces by his partner
Zuzana Licko and other designers championed by Emigre Graphics.
As printed objects, these issues are collectors' items
now. As documents, they are essential viewing and reading for
anyone who wants to understand how we got to where we are today
in graphic design. Buy them while you can. Too bad that some
design school libraries failed to subscribe to Emigre while they
had the chance, depriving later generations of students of a
vital resource.
The same goes for the smaller-format issues
introduced in 1995. The writing that VanderLans published over
the next few years by designers and design educators such as
Jeffery Keedy, Andrew Blauvelt, Lorraine Wild and Kenneth
FitzGerald did much to set the intellectual pace in design
criticism and anyone concerned with such matters should consult
back issues from this period. Sometimes the essays became
hopelessly self-indulgent and you wanted to shake the writer
and yell "get a grip," but you had to admire
VanderLans' willingness to take a chance on people and it
paid off with pieces that could never have appeared anywhere
else. Keedy stands out as the quintessential Emigre insider:
knowledgeable, dedicated and waspish; part sensitive type
scholar, part hatchet man; a postmodern proselytiser who was
always ready to turn a jet of withering scorn on modernist
backsliders. (He suspected I was one of them, but Mr. K, I was
a swing-several-ways pluralist all along.) The feeling that
something was actually at stake made it compelling and the
feuds were part of the fun. Vignelli calls Emigre a factory of garbage!
Heller laments the sheer ugliness of it all in Eye! Emigre retaliates
with a series of interviews with Heller and the offended
parties! Blauvelt gives Heller a good kicking to make sure the
job is well and truly done! Kinross fires off a 32-page
pamphlet setting everyone straight! Keedy names and shames the
zombie modernists (again)!
It has been obvious since the short-lived
switch in 2001 to CDs in wallets that Emigre was running out of
steam. VanderLans appeared to have lost his earlier zest for
design discussion. The paperbacks were a return to something
resembling the old form, though minus the visual thrill, but as
he notes with his customary frankness in the last issue, sales
fell. A lot of the writing seemed to repeat what had already
been said, or to sound a note of dismay for the supposed demise
of discourse. In the background, too, as VanderLans makes
clear, was the rise of the blogs. Emigre used to receive a remarkable quantity of
impassioned mail and he could sometimes fill half an issue with
it. But when it comes to feedback, nothing can match the speed
and ease of the comment box and the chance to interact.
Design blogs generate a lot of noise and
they sure do love their own hype, but nothing produced in this
area has so far equalled the concentrated documentary
achievement and design culture transforming impact of Emigre and if you
doubt this, just go and look at the magazine. Emigre had a clearly
defined purpose. It involved contributions by many talented
people, but the conduit for all this fervour and brain power
was provided by one unusually astute editor. Emigre emerged at a time
when technology was changing design forever and the magazine
sizzled with this energy and excitement. Nothing so momentous
or contentious is happening in graphic design today. Blogs, on
the other hand, lack the focus of an overriding design mission.
They are places for chatter. They are about anything,
everything and often about nothing of any great consequence. No
one, so far, has used the medium to stake out an urgent
critical position comparable to Keedy's or
Blauvelt's in the pages of Emigre in the 1990s. Nor have blogs proved to be the
medium for exploring new design aesthetics. In Emigre, form itself
became a means of debate. What the magazine said was
inseparable from how it looked.
Emigre is
somewhat neglected now. It has fallen out of fashion as it was
bound to and it is too close to view it with total clarity. In
time, the magazine and the fertile, idea-packed design culture
it represented will be studied with the kind of attention given
to 1920s modernism and it will be seen for what it
was - one of the watershed contributions to 20th-century
typography and graphic design.
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Essays on Emigre
An Ending
By Rick Poynor
Critical Conditions:
Zuzana Licko, Rudy VanderLans, and the Emigre Spirit
By Michael Dooley
Digressions and Transgressions: Emigre (The Texts)
By Andrew Blauvelt
Seeing and Reading
A Viewer’s Guide to Periodic Literature
By Kenneth FitzGerald
Graphic designers probably won’t read this . . . but,
By Mr. Keedy
Where’s the party? (Still searching.)
By David Cabianca
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