Figuring the Emigre Magazine Index (Part 1)
Setting out to design the thing I could not find.
This is the first in a series of short essays based on my Emigre magazine project, which I published in Design & Culture journal as “Designing the Emigre Magazine Index: Theory and Practice in an Alternative Research Tool” (need access? The A.M. version is on my website here).
The Emigre Magazine Index interface can be used here (via archive.org)
“Digital technology is a great big unknown, and after all, a mystery is the most stimulating force in unleashing the imagination” — Licko and VanderLans, introduction to Emigre no. 11, 1989.
Emigre magazine was published from 1984 to 2005 and it is, according to the first issue, “the magazine that ignores boundaries.” It was founded by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko. It's progressive and subversive, and it was also a means for graphic designers to explore the limits of their practices. Eventually, the magazine became an influential voice in the field. There are sixty-nine issues, of various sizes and scopes, with subject matter ranging from aesthetics to writing to photography. The magazine also served as a marketplace for Emigre fonts.
A magazine, especially a graphic design magazine, is meta-designed in two ways: its contents are visual (designed with form) and written (designed with words). Through form and content, a magazine like Emigre represents the values and attitudes of the people who built it.
As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, I learned that the Goldstein Museum of Design is one of sixteen institutions worldwide to have a complete collection of Emigre magazines. The issues are in museum storage and they're viewable on-site by appointment.
It struck me that there was an opportunity to research something through this collection, and with that in mind, I started paging through the issues, one by one.
Inspiring, fascinating things are printed on those pages. And, it was nearly impossible to find anything specific without an index or master table of contents.
Like any good scholar, I started digging around online for an index. I did not find one.
Knowing Emigre was worth my time and effort, I proposed a public program about the magazine. My proposal involved research through design(ing) a digitally interactive ‘something’ that would do two things: make visible its history, and provide access to interested people. Pretty sure I also used the term “digital landscape” in my proposal (what does that even mean?! — but I still love the term.)
Emigre’s website is a great place to see cover artwork, selected interior images, and some issue summaries and selected essays. Other institutions, like libraries and museums, also have issues in their collections. However, if a museum includes Emigre in its online collection, there is usually an image of the cover, and the work is attributed to one or two people. It’s neat, and tidy, and fits the institution’s content management system. This practice, beyond Emigre, may work for artworks but not design artifacts. The omission of vital information (interior pages, etc.) can affect the way an object is seen and understood online. There are many people involved, front and center as well as behind the scenes — editors, writers, producers, printers — and there’s far more to it than the cover alone.
Digitizing the entire collection, which would be sixty-nine printed issues of multiple pages and different kinds of media and formats, was beyond the scope of the project. Also, I knew that, in good time, this was bound to happen elsewhere… Years later, Emigre, Inc. donated the full archive to Letterform Archive, where issues may be viewed digitally.
I approached this project solo, with limited funding and a stack of magazines. And so, I set out to design the thing I could not find: an index of Emigre.
In the next part of this series, I’ll describe my process and methods, as I weathered the high temps of a Minnesota summer in a climate-controlled room surrounded by stacks of Emigre… and filled my notebooks with its contents.