EMIGRE: AN ENDING
Cover of Issue 69 of Emigre
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 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.
For more information, contact:
Rick Poynor
E:
About this article
Reprinted from Design Observer, November 2005
About Rick Poynor
Rick Poynor founded Eye magazine in London in 1990, edited it for seven years and is now its resident columnist. He writes the 'Observer' column for Print magazine and he has written about design, media and visual culture for Blueprint, Icon, Frieze, Domus, I.D., Metropolis, Harvard Design Magazine, Adbusters, The Guardian, The Financial Times, and many other publications.
His books include More Dark Than Shark (1986), a study of Brian Eno's early songs, Typography Now: The Next Wave (1991), and Typographica (2001). He is the author of two collections of essays, Design Without Boundaries (1998) and Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001). No More Rules, a critical study of graphic design and postmodernism, appeared in 2003.
Poynor studied the history of art at Manchester University and gained an MPhil in design history from the Royal College of Art, London. He has been a visiting professor at the RCA and a tutor at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, and he lectures widely on design matters in Europe, the United States and Australia. He is guest curator of the exhibition 'Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties', which opened at the Barbican Centre, London in September 2004 and is touring in China through 2005.