The Emperor Font

The typeface that arouse a new revolution in typeface design

DESIGNED and EDITED BY REBECCA LEE

INTRODUCTION

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EMPEROR is

CLASSIFIED into which typeface’s family? Are we able to analyze its

ANATOMY

REVOLUTION of the font family

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ZUZANA LICKO

The leads typographer of DIGITAL

TYPEFACE

EMIGRE

1st TYPE FOUNDRY to design fonts made for computer

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THE INTERVIEWS

USAGE of THE FONT

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NEW TECHNOLOGIES ALWAYS LEAD US TO ANOTHER REVOLUTION, IT IS THE SAME WHEN GOES TO TYPOGRAPHIC. THE REVOLUTIONS OF TYPOGRAPHIC RARELY HIT THE HEADLINES, BUT THEY DID CREATE

W

A

V

S E

WHICH INFLUENCED BY TRENDS AND CULTURES OF THE ERA. ACCORDING TO THE TOPIC I CHOSE TO STUDY, THE TYPOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION OCCURS IN

YEAR1984

ZUZANA LICKO

ONE OF THE PIVOTAL TYPOGRAPHER.

THE EMPEROR FONT,

WHICH NOW REPLACED AS LO-RES FONT, IS ONCE A PURELY EXPERIMENTAL ENDEAVOUR AT THE MOMENT SHE DESIGNED IT. THE ARISE OF EMPEROR FONT CAN BE ASCRIBE TO NEWLY INVENTED MACINTOSH COMPUTER AND A BITMAP FONT TOOL.

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The two largest evolutionary leaps in typography have been a result of new technology, when printing press took us from hand to print, and the computer took us from print to screen. But early designer digital type designers learned that new technology means new limitation. In the late 80s-early 90s, digital type had a short run as low resolution bitmap type displayed on screen. New technology quickly took over, but those ďŹ rst popular bitmap fonts are not gone and forgotten; they are still heavily inuencing type designers today.

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Zuzana Licko

was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in 1961. At the age of seven she emigrated with her family to the United States. Some can say she was destined to be an artist.

Early on she was expose to computers. While in junior college she took a computer class, it peaked her interest even more. She was steadily exposed to computers when her father, a biomathemetician at the University of California at San Francisco asked her to assist him with data processing. This gave Zuzana and opportunity to put her skills to good use. It was then that she designed her ďŹ rst typeface: A Greek alphabet that her father used in writing his scientiďŹ c papers. This would cultivate her talent more and increase her passions in typeface design.

In 1981 she entered undergraduate school at University of California at Berkeley to study architecture. Her interests shifted in a different direction, she switched her focus to visual studies. She spent hours reading books on graphic design. Studying under designers Marc Treib, Alistar Johnston and Francis Butler. Zuzana interests in other mediums grew as well. She became interested in photography, and experimented with various photogtaphic printing processes.She later enrolled in a computer programming course where she ďŹ rst experimented with the design of low resolution type, this also led to her taking a work-study class under Aaron Marcus, who's Berkeley based graphic design studio was involved with the development of digital fonts.

Zuzana graduated from Berkeley in 1983.

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It was also at Bekeley that she met her future husband and partner, Rudy VanderLans. VanderLans was born in Holland ina 1955, he attended the Royal Academy of Fine Art in The Hague. He received his diploma in graphic design in 1979. He the set his sights on travelling around the United States. While visiting California, he decided to appLy to the University of California at Berkeley. From 1981-1983 he studied photography. It was here he met Zuzana Licko. In 1983 VanderLans and Zuzana Licko were married. After graduating from Berkeley, Licko worked a short time for graphic designer Gordon Chun in Berkeley, but soon realized that he wanted to work for himself, and started to work as a freelance graphic designer in 1985.

Lo-Res family of fonts is a synthesis of pixelated designs, including Emigre's earlier coarse resolution fonts, as well as bitmap representations of Base 9.

It replaces the pre-existing Emigre, Emperor, Oakland and Universal families and groups these related bitmap designs under one family name in the font menu, thereby simplifying their naming.

The

fonts also offer technical improvements,

including a more complete character set, more consistent character shapes among styles and weights, as well as improved alignment among the various resolutions.

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BOLD ALT / OAKLAND 8

BOLD / EMIGRE 8

REGULAR / UNIVERSAL 8

NARROW / EMPEROR 8

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More than ďŹ fteen years ago, Zuzana Licko designed a series of coarse bitmap fonts, created on the newly introduced Macintosh computer with a crude public domain software. These fonts were considered by many designers as a cute computer effect - generally relegated to special effect status like blown-up halftone screens and coarse photo grains.

During the following decade, bitmaps continued to be marginalized, but would not disappear. While computer screen displays increased more in size than in resolution, computer generated typefaces did attain print quality through the implementation of outline font technologies, such as PostScript, and high resolution output devices. As a result, bitmapped fonts made only the occasional appearance in print when something computer related was to be expressed.

Recently, however, coarse bitmapped fonts have made a huge comeback in print. And this time around, their usage goes far beyond computer related themes, although it remains a dominant typographic force within areas such as techno music and other disciplines where computer technology has had an impact. The reasons for this dramatic comeback are varied.

Most obvious is that a new generation of young graphic designers has entered the profession. For these designers, and their audiences, who grew up playing video games and now surf the Internet, low resolution type is no longer an alien, difďŹ cult-to-read, crude computer phenomenon.It's been a part of their daily reading experience at home and at school. For this generation, it may be that reading a crude bitmap in print is no different than reading it on the screen. Through our everyday encounters with computers,

the idiosyncrasies of bitmaps are disappearing - visible pixels are becoming accepted as the natural mark of the computer, like brush strokes on an oil painting.

The acceptance of bitmaps should not be a complete surprise; bitmapped images and type have a long history.

After all, prior to computer graphics, bitmaps had long served a multitude of ubiquitous visual forms including tiled mosaics, tapestries, embroidery, knitting and weaving. In each of these disciplines, distinct elements (pixel units) of color or shade are combined to form a coherent image.

Currently, bitmaps are also gaining popularity due to their continued use in electronic gadgets other than PCs. While computer developers strive towards faster performance and higher resolution in high-end devices, respectively lower resolutions remain more affordable, portable and efďŹ cient and therefore continue to be implemented in such devices as cell phones, pagers and microwave oven panels.

Accordingly, the need for type and graphics that address the coarse resolution environment will remain in demand; a demand that is particularly pressing, since these low-resolution components often function as the crucial link between humans and machines.

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Emigre, Inc. is a digital type foundry, publisher and distributor of graphic design related software and printed materials based in Northern California.

Founded in 1984, coinciding with the birth of the Macintosh, Emigre was one of the ďŹ rst independent type foundries to establish itself centered on personal computer technology. Emigre holds exclusive license to over 300 original typeface designs created by a roster of contemporary designers. Emigre's full line of typefaces, ornaments and illustrations is available in Type 1 PostScript and TrueType for both the Macintosh and PC. Emigre is also the publisher of the critically acclaimed design journal Emigre magazine which was published between 1984 and 2005.

Emigre 1 : The Magazine That Ignores Boundaries Mailing Address :

Emigre Inc. 1700 Shattuck Ave., #307 Berkeley, CA 94709, USA.

General Info :

info@emigre.com 1-530-756-2900

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The Lo-Res family of fonts is a synthesis of pixelated designs, including Emigre's earlier coarse resolution fonts, as well as bitmap representations of Base 9. It replaces the preexisting Emigre, Emperor, Oakland and Universal families and groups these related bitmap designs under one family name in the font menu, thereby simplifying their naming. The Lo-Res fonts also offer technical improvements, including a more complete character set, more consistent character shapes among styles and weights, as well as improved alignment among the various resolutions.

The number in each Lo-Res font name indicates the number of pixels in its body, or ppem ("pixels per em".) On a standard Macintosh display, this is equal to the point size; under Windows the point size will appear reduced by approximately 75% on a 96 dpi display.

To add variety for high resolution applications, the Lo-Res Plus and Lo-Res Minus variants were developed. These counterparts to Lo-Res 9 mimic the effect of photographically overexposing and underexposing, which become apparent when bitmaps are reproduced with such methods as photocopying. (The underexposed effect applied to the Minus series was inspired by Rian Hughes's Mastertext Light.)

Unlike bitmap fonts, most typefaces used on today's computers are resolution independent. They are designed at very high resolutions, making their shapes scalable to virtually any size. However, because they usually are not (or can not be) optimized for low resolutions, they are difďŹ cult to read on screen at small sizes.

In contrast, a bitmap font is designed to be optimized for a speciďŹ c resolution; that is, a speciďŹ c number of pixels relative to it's body. In order to achieve perfect pixel control at small sizes, bitmap designs incorporate the pixels in their structure. The result is that the pixels remain apparent when the fonts are scaled to other sizes. (Their apparent resolution does not increase as the resolution of the output device is increased, for example, from video display to a printed page.) Therefore, each bitmap design is tied to a resolution.

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The result is that bitmaps have a strong and decisive character, which is most noticeable when used at headline sizes. In print work, bitmaps also function well at very small sizes; their modular proportions maintain open counters and there are no delicate details to drop out or ďŹ ll in.

The bitmapped aesthetic is here to stay because it's inextricably linked to computer technology, and computers are increasingly affecting the production of, and our relation to, everything around us. As information is increasingly being stored, accessed and displayed in digital form, screen display has become the ďŹ nal method of viewing much of our information.

The coarser the resolution of the grid, the larger is the relative size of the pixels, and the more limited is the possibility of pixel placement. While this limits the variety of representable font characteristics, such limitations can be a strong source of design inspiration. Constraints on design choices allow many options to be evaluated quickly. By contrast, having many choices can be overwhelming, and the solution is often more difďŹ cult to distill from the myriad of options.

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THIS CONTENT IS SELECTED PARTIALLY FROM AN INTERVIEW BY RUDY VANDERLANS AND PUBLISHED IN EMIGRE MAGAZINE IN YEAR 1990.

Emigre: Are you saying that only typefaces that come naturally out of a certain technology have validity?

Zuzana Licko: No, although personally I think that those typefaces often do look most powerful, because they were created for a very specific purpose and show real intent. I am bent on making the medium work to the advantage of the design because I find pleasure in that; no other reason. I don't necessarily think that a device-independent typeface, like Stone for instance, is invalid. Although I don't think that a typeface like that accomplishes anything new, I could be wrong. It's all a matter of opinion. It's just that I don't find pleasure in what those type designers are involved in. I'm very much interested in the device. That's where I get my creative energy from. And I guess other people don't. A designer like Gerard Unger, for example, loves curves.

To him it doesn't matter whether the curves are drawn by pencil or by the computer as long as they are the curves that he's looking for. He has a vision. I don't have that.

E: But you do have a certain aim when you design type, don't you?

ZL: Yes. My aim is to explore two things. First of all, I like to experiment with what the computer can do with things that were not possible with other technologies. I like to design letterforms that work well with the computer, both for pragmatic reasons and stylistic reasons. Because sometimes, not always, but sometimes, you do need something that works well on the screen, like Emperor Eight. If you do a lot of editing on the screen or you use the ImageWriter printer, you do, for pragmatic reasons, need a coarse resolution typeface. But then, some of my other typefaces look geometric or coarse for stylistic reasons. For instance, Matrix could just as well have had more traditional looking serifs, but for stylistic reasons, for making it look new, I use a shape that the computer is good at generating. My other aim when designing typefaces is to see how much the basic letter shapes can be changed and still be functional, like the lower case g in Matrix or some of the Variex characters.

I am always very intrigued by experimental alphabets that either have no capitals or mix upper and lower characteristics, like Bradbury Thompson's Alphabet 26, or his typeface that has only lower case and uses boldface characters for caps. This is actually what Matthew Carter at Bitstream suggested I do with Variex, since there is no upper or lower case in Variex. I like that, although it is not always applicable.

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E: Right! Not everybody is used to staring at a low resolution Macintosh screen all day like you. And your type is eventually used in print, people very seldom read it off the screen.

ZL: I know! But why did letter press type start to look a certain way, and why was that eventually accepted?

Not because people were reading the type off the bed of the letterpress. They were still reading it off the printed page. That didn't have anything more to do with casting lead than it does with computer chips today, but that's where it comes from, and that's what we've gotten used to. It's the same with Blackletter, which was at one point more legible to people than humanist typefaces. That's a shocker. I agree with the fact that if you are setting books and other things that just need to be read and understood easily, you need to use something other than Oakland Six. In those cases you need to use something that is not necessarily intrinsically more legible, but that people are used to seeing. This is what makes certain typestyles more legible or comfortable. You read best what you read most. However, those preferences for typefaces such as Times Roman exist by habit, because those typefaces have been around longest. When those typefaces ďŹ rst came out, they were not what people were used to either. But because they got used, they have become extremely legible. Maybe some of my typefaces will eventually reach this point of acceptance, and therefore become more legible; two hundred years from now, who knows?

E: Sure, they feel comfortable to you and me and in relationship to the medium, but how are people supposed to understand this, and link that to print? It still looks very uncomfortable to people who eventually just want to read it.

ZL: But why is that? It's because they're not used to seeing low resolution type, I think.

E: When you look back at your early low resolution type, do you feel you succeeded?

ZL: For myself, yes. But then later I discovered quite a bit of material that I should have seen before I started.

Issue number 6 of Baseline magazine, which was edited by Erik Spiekermann, was very good and informative.

But then again, if I had read it beforehand, I might never have tried to explore the really basic ideas that I had.

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While computer developers strive towards faster performance and higher resolution in high-end devices, respectively lower resolutions remain more affordable, portable and efďŹ cient and therefore continue to be implemented in such devices as cell phones, pagers and microwave oven panels. Lo-Res font, appears on till shopping screens and receipts. It is probably one of the most seen fonts.

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......THANK YOU......