Alumna Spotlight: Zuzana Licko ‘79

When you think back to your time at Drew School, what moments or experiences first shaped the way you think about creativity and design? Were there classes, teachers, or projects that stayed with you as you found your path?

I think Drew gave me the space to be an individual. Coming to the US from Czechoslovakia when I was seven, I was always aware of being different, of seeing things from an outsider's perspective. Drew felt like a place where questioning was encouraged rather having to fit in. And taking time to ask questions is at the core of being an artist or designer.

My favorite subjects were math and any sort of art or maker class. While improving my drawing skills, I remember being fascinated with the unpredictability of ceramics, as well the logic of trigonometry. I loved the puzzle-solving aspect of math. There was something deeply satisfying about working within strict rules to find elegant solutions. That attraction to constraint and structure would later become central to my approach to type design, which happened to be appropriate for the primitive digital technology in 1984. When you're working on a 9-pixel grid for a bitmap font, or deciding how to construct curves with early digital tools, it's really a matter of solving visual puzzles within very specific limitations.

Your career has been defined by innovation — especially at the intersection of design and technology. How did your interests begin to take shape after Drew, and what led you toward typography and digital design?

My interest in both visual art and mathematics, drew me to architecture at UC Berkeley. But once I got there, I found myself more intrigued by the related classes, such as photography, letterpress, and typography. I remember telling a classmate I'd signed up for a typography class, and we talked for several minutes before I realized he thought I meant topography (elevation mapping)! That's how marginal these subjects were.

I've always been fascinated by the shapes of letters. It actually made reading difficult because I'd get so distracted by letterform details that I'd have to constantly re-read text to follow the meaning. Once it became possible to actually design lettershapes and make them into fonts with the early personal computer, my career path clicked into place.

The turning point came just as I was graduating from Berkeley in 1984, which was the year that the Macintosh was introduced. I pre-ordered one with my student discount. I still remember picking it up on campus, in this large ballroom stacked to the rafters with these machines.

What excited me about the Mac was precisely its limitations. Established designers dismissed it as a cute novelty, but to me it seemed wondrously uncharted and perfectly matched to my own fledgling design career. I had few preconceived notions about how typefaces "should" be designed, so I was free to explore what this new medium could do. The process of designing typefaces had been a complete mystery to me until then, it required access to proprietary equipment and specialized knowledge. Suddenly, with this little computer and some public domain software, I could create bitmap fonts and print them on a dot matrix printer. It was magical.

You co-founded Emigre at a moment when digital tools were fundamentally changing graphic design. What excited you about that shift, and what do you remember most about those early years of experimentation and risk-taking?

Actually, Emigre started quite organically, almost by accident. Rudy (my husband) had founded the magazine with two Dutch artist friends as a showcase for émigré artists while I was experimenting with type design. These two activities converged when I started creating fonts for the magazine. Using our own fonts made typesetting more economical and gave us greater creative control.

When the magazine showcased my fonts, designers started asking if they were available. So we started selling copies on floppy disks, and our foundry was born. The magazine allowed us to test new fonts in realistic settings using actual texts, and the sale of fonts financed more magazine issues.

The really exciting thing about those early years was that there was no established visual language for digital design. We were working with such primitive tools that we had to invent solutions from scratch. The first time we used the Mac for Emigre in 1985, there were no page layout programs. No PostScript. No laser printers. We printed low-resolution type on a dot matrix printer, on paper, as large as we could, then reduced it using a stat camera and pasted it down on boards.

And I loved having something to react against. The early Macintosh was so limited, the coarse resolution, tiny screen, minimal memory. But paradoxically, those constraints inspired more free exploration than working with today's limitless possibilities. There was always a puzzle to solve, a problem to overcome. We had to reconsider basic assumptions.

Looking back, are there particular typefaces or projects that feel especially meaningful to you — either because of their impact or what they taught you creatively?

What I find most meaningful isn't individual typefaces, but the process itself. Each design taught me something new about form, about working within and against constraints, about how much you can push letterforms and still have them function. Typography is endlessly fascinating because you're always working with this tension between innovation and recognition, between making something fresh and making something readable.

Having said that, the Mrs Eaves font family is special, partly because of its success, it became our bestselling font and I see it everywhere, from book covers to restaurant menus to junk mail, but more because of what it represents. After years of designing experimental, technology-driven fonts, creating Mrs Eaves was about going back to basics, learning from historical models while making something new.

I approached it by studying printed specimens of Baskerville, then drawing the forms "from memory," letting the impression of what I'd studied guide my hand rather than trying to copy exactly. I wanted to capture the warmth of letterpress printing, that ink spread into paper, rather than the clinical perfection of metal type or photo versions.

Matrix was meaningful for different reasons. It was my first PostScript font, designed under severe memory constraints. I used simple geometric ratios and limited the points needed to define letterforms to save computer memory space. Those triangular serifs came from pragmatic necessity, but they became the font's signature characteristic.
 

What advice would you give to current Drew students who are interested in creative fields, especially those who want to build careers that don’t follow a traditional or obvious path?

First, embrace being an outsider and thinking differently. Turn constraints into creative challenges. This might sound counterintuitive in an age where technology can do almost anything, but I still find that setting limits, whether they're technological, material, or self-imposed, helps focus creative thinking. 

Find your own puzzles to solve, make sure you're working on something that genuinely interests you, and then be prepared to work really hard. I think that if you nurture your interest, and practice within whatever medium interests you, it will help inform whatever career path you take, even in seemingly unrelated fields.

Design sits at this interesting intersection of preservation and innovation. You're always building on what came before while trying to create something new.