The story of Emigre Magazine and Rudy Vanderlans.
MIGRATING “The focus of Emigre is on the unique perspective of contemporary
poets, writers, journalists, graphic designers, photographers, architects, and artists who live or have lived outside their native countries. Their influence on culture is diverse and significant: they import it and export
Styles
it; they offer new interpretations, comparisons, ideas, and a certain universal wisdom acquired through juggling conflicting values and lifestyles. Their perspective is born of the émigré spirit that all of us share but exercise to various degrees. The true émigrés seek adventuresome, romantic, and human experiences; their lives convey the feelings shared by the artist in us all, the feeling of boundaries ignored and the pursuit of dreams.” This is the idea on which Émigré Magazine was founded, from the hand of Rudy Vanderlans, editor and art director of the 69 issues of the print. An emigrant is someone that leaves ones country for political reasons. Vanderlans left his native country around 1980 looking for new ways of thinking, new culture and style of life. He found a home on the West Coast to his spoiled child, Émigré Magazine, a graphic diary, different from the international tendency that influenced him on his formative years.
Bottom left spread from Emigre 50 Think Ink (1999) Top right page from Emigre 57 Lost Formats Presentation Society (2001) Center right page from Emigre 43 Designers Are People Too (1997) Bottom right picture from flickr Tribute to Emigre Magazine (http://www.flickr. com/photos/partofme/2516053188/)
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Who is the man behind the magazine?
RUDY VANDERLANS was born in The Hague, The Netherlands in 1955. He attended the Royal
Academy of Fine Arts from 1974 to 1979 and got a degree in graphic design, even though his interests where primarily in illustration. He learned under the Bauhaus methodology during his learning years in graphic design, mostly studio classes and hardly any theory. The international style was broadly used at the time, so he learned how to use design to serve the form and then the function as it was stated. The use of a grid, sans serif type usually flushed left ragged right and the use of black and white photography predominated in the pieces created during those years in Netherlands. Designs ended up being very simple, objective and worked as a harmonious unity . After graduating he worked for important graphic studios in Holland like Total Design and Vorm Vijf, which used the Swiss methodology in their pieces. He got disappointed with graphic design very soon, “it was not at all what I had hoped it would be” as he answered on an interview for the
where they met. After his first year he got a job at a local newspaper
IDEA magazine of Japan. He didn’t felt motivated by the clients nor the
“The San Francisco Chronicle” as a designer. This job was eye opening
pieces he produced.
for him since he realized it had nothing to do with what he had learned
In 1980 he decided to go to the United States West Coast looking for
back home. All the ideas about legibility or right type to use, was not
something different than what he had learned back home. He enrolled in
really taken into consideration, whether in Holland every piece of daily
Berkley University and majored in photography. By this time, his soon to
use, from mailing stamps to money bills, integrated design and function
be life partner and coworker, Zuzana Licko was also attending to Berkley,
as he described in the book Graphic Design A New History of Stephen J. Eskilson. All this helped him get inspired instead of alarmed, in the newspaper, the editor was in charge of the design, making the pages served the purpose of reading without necessarily having to be the best design.
Top left cover from Emigre 49 Everything is for Sale Issue. Top right picture of Rudy Vanderlans.
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NEW COUNTRY, NEW WAYS OF THINKING By 1983 as a response of the new American mentality and as a revelation of the strict style of his alma mater, Vanderlans decided to start a side project with two Dutch designers, a magazine called Émigré. Without any experience in the publishing field and financed by themselves the first issue was published, it contained xerox copies, collage and cutouts from his photography. This became their new adventure, a play ground where they could experiment and look for different and innovative ways of designing and delivering information. U&lc and Hard Werken inspired the new magazine’s format. It was a space for new artists to show their work and a vehicle that transport new ideas.
Top left spread from Emigre 37 Joint Ventures (1996) Bottom Left cover of Emigre 42 The Mercantile Issue (1997) Bottom right from Emigre 52 The Magazine You Love to Hate (1999) On the next page top left spread from Emigre 56 The Emigre Legacy: 16 of Graphic Design Production (2000)
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As a result from the new trends, the time and place where he moved to, the mere fact that he moved away from Holland to a new country, and breaking the grid of his past school, Vanderlans made Émigré very
w e G, N RULES.
strong in concept and implementation. The name of the magazine was given by the fact that the group that issued the first magazine where all emigrants from their countries. They wanted to publish the work of artists, designers, photographers, illustrators, poets and friends foreigners in the USA. The quarterly issued magazine grew up in fame quickly. By the second issue they were able to ensemble the whole magazine with a Macintosh computer, their number one tool but brand new to the world. The new computers were especially helpful to Zuzana Licko (Vanderlans’ wife and coworker) whom started to create new typefaces with the programs they had. It wasn’t until further in the story of the magazine that Licko’s typography took over the layouts of the issues and won all the attention of their reader/ viewers. Vanderlans used the magazine as a vehicle to promote and test his wife’s fonts, a very strategic move from this duo, since as a result of the popularity of the typefaces they created a foundry that ended up being the sponsor of the magazine. After 69 issues of success and critics Vanderlans accepted that even thought he would probably not repeat the designs he used for the first
So what really influenced Vanderlans to create a magazine out the
issues they suited the purpose he longed, experimenting and finding
parameters he was taught in school?
a way out of the modern style into post modernism and out to the
Designers like Milton Glaser and Heinz Edelman interested him, since
contemporary ages lived now a days. It helped open new horizons and
these used illustration as a way of communication. Using a personal mark
even became a trend among the young people’s ways of communicating
in you designs instead of looking all alike. The magazine U&lc when Herb
at the time. It established a transitional path between what went on in
Lubalin designed it, inspired Vanderlans in the way that designer turned
the United States from mid 1980 to mid 2000 in design and became an
type into illustration and delivered messages in a more effective way.
icon and a milestone in the graphic design history.
Moving to the West Coast of the United States at the beginning of the
Endnotes and other sources used:
80’s had mayor effect on him. He describes the context of California
1. Rudy Vanderlans, “Emigre 1 The Magazine that Ignores Boundaries”, Emigre Online.
during that time in the article How to be a Graphic Designer Without
http://www.emigre.com/EMag.php?issue=1
Losing Your Soul, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2005: “The so-called “New Wave” with designers like April Greiman was starting to bloom, and CalArts was in the early days of its development as an
2. International Poster Gallery Online, “International Typographic Style”, http://www. internationalposter.com/about-poster-art/international-typographic.aspx 3. Rudy Vanderlans, “How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul”, Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. www.emigre.com
experimental design hot house with Jeffery Keedy, Ed Fella and Lorraine
Dooley, Michael. “Critical Conditions: Zuzana Licko, Rudy VanderLans, and the Emigré
Wild teaching there. And Henk Elenga and Rick Vermeulen of Hard
Spirit” The American Institute of Graphic Arts. 1998.
Werken were out in L.A. All the misfits of graphic design ended up in
Eskilson, Stephen. “Graphic Design: A New History”. 2007. Emigre Graphics. Emigre: Graphic Design into the Digital Realm. 1993.
California, and then the Macintosh computer was thrown into mix, and it
Heller, Steven. “Interview to Rudy Vanderlans”. AIGA website. 2004.
all exploded. So it turned out to be quite advantageous for me to move,
Koga, Toshiaki. “Interview to Rudy Vanderlans”. IDEA magazine. Japan, 2005.
but it was a total coincidence that I happened to end up in the right place at the right time.” The majority of the designers he mentions were later published in various issues of the magazine.
Meggs, Phillip B., and Purvis, Alston W. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design Fourth Edition. Canada: John Wiley and Sons. 2006. Peters, Yves. “Emigre Celebrates 25 Years In Graphic Design”. The Font Feed Blog. August 21, 2009. http://fontfeed.com/archives/emigre-celebrates-25-years-in-graphicdesign/
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