EMIGRE 10
Cranbrook
Glenn Suokko [Editor/Art Director
Glenn Suokko [Editor/Art Director: EMIGRE 10 [Cranbrook]. Berkeley, CA: Emigre, 1988. Original edition [2,000 copies]. Slim quartos. Printed saddle stitched wrappers. [32] pp. Poster by Rudy VanderLans laid in [as issued]. Elaborate graphic design throughout. This oversized journal inevitably invited use and abuse, but a lightly handled, nearly fine copy.
Includes the 22.25 x 32.75 poster “See for Yourself” designed by Rudy VanderLans folded into quarters.
11.125 x 16.75 saddle stitched magazine exploring the nature of heritage in contemporary Graphic Design, circa 1988. Printed at Lompa Printing, Albany, CA. Design and production: Rudy VanderLans. Typeface designs: Zuzana Licko.
Contents
- Kathy Holman and Glenn Suokko, The Exchange (introduction).
- Scott W. Santoro, Plumbing and Postcards.
- Susan Lally, A Fraction of American Culture from Fifteen Minutes of Radio.
- Rick Vermeulen with Laura Genninger, The Radio, Rotterdam.
- Esther Vermeer, Welcome to Holland.
- Lisa Anderson, Holland, Michigan.
- Helene Bergmans, The Miniature and the Gigantic.
- Andrew Blauvelt, The Miniature and the Gigantic.
- Rudy VanderLans, See for Yourself (poster).
- Ed McDonald, Writing about....
- Jan Jancourt, Pieces Numbered....
- Tamar Rosenthal and Harry Arens, Work Relate Power Consume.
- Arch Garland and Vincent van Baar, Landscapes.
- Darice Koziel, A Notation on American Culture.
- Allen Hori, AIDS.
Excerpted from "Katherine McCoy: Expanding Boundaries” by Lorraine Wild: Katherine [McCoy] often has said that it was a visit to the Museum of Modern Art (on a family trip to the New York world’s Fair in 1964) that made her realize she was most interested in the power of design. After majoring in industrial design at Michigan State University and graduating in 1967, she took a job in the Detroit offices of Unimark International, design consultants who produced some of the largest and most notable corporate identity projects of the period. The offices of Unimark, where she received her real typographic training, were famous for the strict, clean “Swiss” Modernism of their designs, which at that time was still unique, almost exotic to corporate communications. Not only did Unimark sell their work to their clients, they also promoted a hyper-rational problem-solving approach to corporate communications, detached from advertising or marketing. The house journal, Dot Zero, published some of the earliest arguments in the United States in support of the Modern style. Immersed in the ideology of problem solving through “objectivity” in form, she spent hours poring over the office copies of the “Swiss Bibles,” typographic books by Müller-Brockmann, Ruder, Gerstner, and Hofmann.
In 1971, Katherine and her husband, Michael, an industrial designer, were founding their partnership, McCoy & McCoy Associates, when they were asked by the Cranbrook Academy of Art to become co-chairs of the design department. Under the direction of Eliel Saarinen from the ’30s to the ’50s, Cranbrook’s graduate-level design department had nurtured and produced several students who went on to become major forces in American architecture and design — Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen, Florence Schust (Knoll), and Ray and Charles Eames, among others. But all schools go through cycles and not much had happened in design at Cranbrook after that. After some hesitation, Michael and Katherine accepted the position, walking into a department that had a great past but no present — although it did have the incredible and subtly beautiful Saarinen-designed campus as a daily reminder of what could be accomplished in that place.
The McCoys were free to reinvent the programs in 2-D and 3-D design however they wanted. Katherine recalls that she combined the “objective” typographic approach that she knew through professional practice with an interest in the social and cultural activism that was in the air in the late ’60s. One early recruitment poster for the program features text that describes the goals of the design program in almost completely Utopian terms, combined with a collage that reproduces fragments of provocative design from both the professional and avant-garde design traditions of the twentieth century. The beginning of the McCoys’ program at Cranbrook can be seen as part of a wave of activity in U.S. design programs that was directed toward more high-level experimental work. California Institute of the Arts, the Kansas City Art Institute, and the Rhode Island School of Design, among other schools, started to offer alternatives to the graduate program at Yale, one of the advanced programs in graphic design studies that not only trained people for professional practice, but encouraged them to work speculatively, beyond the professional model.
From Emigre's website: “Emigre, Inc. is a digital type foundry based in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1984, coinciding with the birth of the Macintosh computer, the Emigre team, consisting of Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, with the addition of Tim Starback in 1993, were among the early adaptors to the new digital technology.
“From 1984 until 2005 Emigre published the legendary Emigre magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to visual communication. Emigre created some of the very first digital layouts and typeface designs winning them both world-wide acclaim and much criticism. The exposure of these typefaces in Emigre magazine eventually lead to the creation of Emigre Fonts, one of the first independent type foundries utilizing personal computer technology for the design and distribution of fonts. They created the model for hundreds of small foundries who followed in their footsteps.
“As a team, Emigre has been honored with numerous awards including the 1994 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and the 1998 Charles Nypels Award for excellence in the field of typography. In 1993 they were selected as a leading design innovator in the First Annual I.D. Forty. Emigre is also a recipient of the 1997 American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal Award, its highest honors. In October 2010 the Emigre team was inducted as Honorary members of the Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago, and in 2013 Licko received the prestigious Annual Typography Award from the Society of Typographic Aficionados. Most recently Emigre received the 29th New York Type Directors Club Medal. Watch the video tribute shown at the presentation of the TDC Medal in the Rose Auditorium at The Cooper Union in New York City in July 2016.
“Complete sets of Emigre magazine are in the permanent collections of: The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Design Museum in London, The Denver Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, The Museum fur Gestaltung in Zurich; and in 2011, five digital typefaces from the Emigre Type Library were acquired by MoMA New York for their permanent design and architecture collection.“