Emigre Fonts: Type Specimens 1986-2024

A 1,500-page compendium containing nearly five decades of remarkable print ephemera from a trailblazing digital type foundry

Emigre is a graphic design and digital type foundry based in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1985 by the husband-and-wife team Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, it was one of the first independent digital type foundries to explore the new design possibilities offered by the MacIntosh computer. It is also known for its legendary design magazine, Emigre, which was a quarterly magazine published between 1984 and 2005. To announce each of its new typeface releases, Emigre published small booklets displaying the virtues of its fonts and revealing the processes used to design them. More than simple sales tools, these type specimens were enjoyed as much for their inventive contents and layouts as for their innovative typeface designs. In 2016, Emigre published the first 18 years of these type specimens in a single book, spanning 1986-2004. This volume reissues the popular contents of the 2016 title (now out of print) and picks up where it left off, combining those first 18 years of materials with additional materials from Emigre's archive, covering 2004 to the present. The result is a massive 1,500-page reference providing a definitive and up-to-date collection of the foundry's remarkable print ephemera since its inception.