It was a typography magazine, we want to complicate the question of modernism and post modernism. Octavia and emigre had different astetics. Emigre was a landmark publication on the graphic design scene because it was trying to do something completely different with type, the founders was rude vanderlanda, Dutch and Susan's licks, Czech. They named it emigre because they came from different countries and this showed the clas of cultures. There original intention was to focus upon liminality. At the time of emigre came around at the same time as the technology boost, when the Apple Macintosh was "born" . Emigre exploited the quirks and possibilities of software to produce a new innovative design language.
Emigre was a digital type foundry. They sold typefaces developed for the magazine. The critics of emigre includes massive viginelli, Stephen heller and David Carson. Viginelli said its a national calamity and an aberration of culture. Heller said it is a blip in the continuum and cult of ugly. Carson said it was too readily identifiable and therefor unusable. Beach culture magazine published an issue with a cover line that boasted no emigre fonts although the logo itself was set in licks senator. Ironically it was designers like Carson who had popularised its style.
Emigre worked a lot with other designers to collaborate with other designers such as ray gun, joint venture, designers Republic and others.
Emigre is distinctive by playing out political debate but by focusing upon formal design issues e.g.type and composition. Technological effects on page design reflected political and social shifts in art culture and mass communication. They'd established a post war design ethic of righteous form that was built on rationalism, minimalism and modernism. They were particularly distinctive for the monotony of international style, they challenged a modernist status quo and pushed against it.
They published things in cd format and other digital ways and even went into emigre music publishing.
Car book is famous for its design, it was famous for drawing attention to the text function and it was suppose to be hard to read and that reading is a conditioned experience. You start to think the text as a graphic visual composition.they want to avoid the separation of form and content. The cranbook academy of arts did collaborations with the students at the academy and others too such as Jeffrey Keedy, ed fella, Lorraine wild they formed the calarts, Andrew blauvelt is the designer and curator of walker art gallery.
Octavia magazine was runnin do currently with emigre. First design journal wanting to describe the need for change in design, octavo had similar agenda as emigre but with a stronger modernist influence. The designs and layouts for octavo were resolved as full scale mock ups using dummy typesetting acetate paint and so on, trying to get as close as possible to appearance of the final work printed. They also had an influence on the record industry they were associated with factory records and produced work for the artists.
