Rudy VanderLans

Who is Rudy VanderLans?

Rudy VanderLans is a Dutch type and graphic designer and the co-founder of Emigre, an independent type foundry, with Czechoslovakian-born designer Zuzana Licko.

VanderLans studied at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. Later, he moved to California and studied photography at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1984, VanderLans, with his wife Zuzana Licko, founded Emigre and began to publish Emigre magazine, a journal for experimental graphic design.

After the release of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, Vanderlans and Licko were inspired to design custom fonts that the macintosh was lacking, resulting in the Emigre Graphics font library, arguably the most trendsetting type collection of the early digital era. Vanderlans himself only designed three font families in the Emigre collection. Variex and Oblong were co-designed with Zuzuana Licko.

Oblong follows a strict rectangular grid and uses only straight lines of equal width.

Variex consists of three weights defined by the same center lines. By changing the thickness around the axis, various weights are obtained therefore the x-height and alignment may vary. The font plays with these variations keeping the axes of the character in the same position in all three weights allowing interesting design possibilities for characters to be layered to form multicolored or outline letters.