Here’s the thing: Speak Up is not important enough to have killed Emigre. It is pompous and arrogant to alternatively disagree and take credit for that. Design Observer could not kill Émigré either, and neither could we.

There are two possible explanations for the “death” of Emigre:

1: The world killed Emigre 2: Emigre killed Émigré

Through one of those two reasons, Émigré lost its relevance in the modern world of design. They couldn’t play, so they picked up their ball and went home.

I am a 27 year old designer. Emigre was important to my instructors, but my fellow students and I were never introduced to it. I only ever heard about it on the side. I’ve never even seen an actual issue, and I am the type of person who saturates their life with this stuff. While the older generation praised it, it was never embraced by the younger generation. Ever. Debbie Millman dropped an excellent point in the comments at Speak Up: How many of those people had even heard of Emigre before this news broke?

Blogs will not kill print. Anyone who thinks so is either stupid or buying to much of their own bullshit. I would not cancel my subscription to Communication Arts to read Speak Up. Hell, I wouldn’t even cancel my subscription to Graphic Design USA for that.

Maybe someday blogs will grow into something better. I hope to be a part of that when it happens. But baby, it’s a long way off.

Okay, so maybe the blogs - or for argument’s sake, the internet - won’t kill print, but I think eventually it may send print on the way of engraving in stone: good if you have a huge budget, but the majority won’t bother. Print’s only hope comes from the fact that modern technology can facilitate making print economical, whereas the printing press could not do that for the chisel and stone.

It always irks me when organizations can’t accept new things that happen to hurt their business. Instead of adapting (and profiting), they fight until their last breath.

Isn’t Graphic Design USA free?

Oy. Nevermind. I just zinged myself. That’s what happens to arrogant Bill O’Reilly’s of Design.

thats a big lost. i was introduced to emigre by my lecture not so long ago, got hold of issue 67 and now, its gone. what a waste. i’m still a student studying but i find very important stuff in it. a wealth of knowledge behind it.

somehow, i still prefer the excitement of holding what im reading. i have nothing against blogs because i think that in the coming future, they might be the next medium of knowledge, just like scrolls in the past i guess..

Adrian, I don’t believe that everything can be accomplished as a blog. Emigre was past their heyday and apparently couldn’t find a way to stay relevant. Mabye the magazine just needed a little better publicity machine. I’m not sure something like Emigre would have worked in blog form. Some aspects, of course, but why water down a great print publication and offer free shorter versions of articles to your readers?

One other thing. What is the problem with paying for writing? We all still buy books, right? I’m sure we pay more than just the cost of the paper it’s printed on. Just because blogs are free doesn’t mean we should cancel our Print, CA, and HOW subscriptions because they don’t have a blog. We are print designers dangit (at least a good percentage of us). We should be the champions of the printed magazine. We should love the smell of ink and not just sit in front of the computer all day. Blogs are great (and more important than Nate would like to admit), but there are not the end all and be all. They are a part of the whole picture. I don’t think they replace anything as much as they are a completely new monster. Hopefully print magazines will take notice of blogs and react in ways besides making a blog of their own. Hopefully blogs will challenge them to be even better. Maybe CA will actually incorporate design into their articles instead of shoving them in the back. OK, I’m just rambling now.

Wether Nate likes to admit it or not, Rudy Vanderlans himself partly blames blogs for the demise of Emigre (read Armin’s article for objections). I think everyone should listen to Rudy’s history of Emigre on the Live Language podcast. Very interesting. He talks about branding and logo posts getting hundreds of comments on blogs (has to be Speak Up) and towards the end, Emigre was only getting two or three Letters to the Editor per issue. This obviously disheartened Rudy enough that he mentioned it several times.

Perhaps I’m simply misremembering earlier interviews with Rudy VanderLans, but I seem to recall he said he and Zuzana had decided to move on to other projects - they didn’t necessary feel like Emigre was carrying out the same function it originally had within the design world, and he felt there were other horizons to move on to. I can’t deny that I was really, really pretty disheartened by the knowledge that Emigre was going away, but I also really respected VanderLans for the decision to pick up other projects and see what might become of a another fresh start - he gave us quite a legacy of issues and writings throughout Emigre and frankly they’re still out there to delve into for anyone willing to hunt them down.

Weighing in as well among the Be A crowd as one of those “Under 30 Emigre readers” we’re casting about at the moment, I’ll openly confess to the enormous influence the magazine had on my thinking about design, especially in my latter years of undergraduate study. While I would regularly devour the articles and reviews that Heller and Poyner contributed to Print, I was always felt the rest of the design writing that filled up Print, How, Step-by-Step, and CA was almost just filler to space the images out more effectively.

Emigre was a different experience from the moment you turned the first page (often enough from the moment you’d see the cover) - it was rich, often dense, always urgent and sort of pulling you along as a reader, generally an education in each issue, and constantly scanning the radars of design thinking and design theory. Somehow, though, even with those lofty sort of effects it was never so deeply mired in theory that it wasn’t extremely, extremely readable. It introduced me to Earls, VanderLans, Licko, Blauvelt, and about a dozen other designers who fostered shared loves: typography and design thinking as two sides of the same coin.

It was often enough within the Emigre universe that the fonts they produced seemed to be the distillation of the design theory they were absorbing and reflecting. It’s been such an intriguing experience to continue working with their fonts long after their initial splashdown - several continue to mature, grow, and ripen; some are quickly gathering an exclusive association with the early 90’s which I fear they won’t ever shake off.

The thinking, however, hasn’t rested yet…

What I think may have been more of the tide which turned readers away from Emigre was the end of the free, four-issue subscription to it - as I watch my current students reactions to the thought of even paying $75 to join the AIGA and reap many of the immediate benefits of connecting with that community, I realize that the free subscription is probably a major reason why I was willing to take the risk on Emigre to begin with…

It’s also probably the biggest parallel to why blogs are going like gangbusters right now - no subscription fees, open forum, and writing by the best and the brightest right alongside joe whoever jumping in just to toss off a few lines.

I do fall a bit into Rick Poyner & Steven Heller’s camp, however, in hoping for just a bit more true editorial oversight on the bigger blogs - I like the way several are turning into really great on-line magazines with a talkback feature. As an addict of good writing, I’m drawn to the writers and readers who take the additional time to really craft what they’re offering even more than most of the shoot-from-the-hip communication that often lands in the threads.’

If Armin’s discussion of Emigre serves no other purpose (and I’ve no doubt it will spark several) my burning hope is that it turns lots of design eyes young and old back to this outstanding magazine - it was a pleasure to know Emigre while it was still vividly ‘alive’.

What? Blogs can’t do everything? Obviously, I am biased on that issue.

“why water down a great print publication and offer free shorter versions of articles to your readers?”

Does the content have to change just because it is online? I don’t think so. I like the smell of ink as much as the next guy, but as long blogs are producing content for free that rivals or surpasses the quality of printed publications, more and more “Emigres” are going to go out of business.

Bennett, DO articles are sometimes longer than print articles. Check out STEP online and compare for yourself.

Sometimes, though, I do think print is still the ideal mobile format. I can bring a print mag many places I can’t carry a laptop or would want to carry a laptop. Plus, design at 150 dpi is much better than design at 72 dpi. :)

The blog/anti-blog debate is entirely demographic, in design and most other fields. Bloggers defend blogging, nonbloggers bemoan blogging. The debate has become a matter of the medium itself rather than content or principle. It is, therefore, empty. Nothing interesting really gets said. So pick a side, put on your colors and let’s all move on.

I thought it would be beneficial to include the portion of Rudy’s Live Language talk in which he mentions Speak Up. I think I transcribed it correctly.

“Letters to Emigre have dwindled to two or three per issue. On Speak Up, the online design forum, hundreds of designers discuss anything and everything. It’s difficult to compete against daily short opinion pieces and the instant replies, in which logo redesigns of large corporations receive most of the attention. The fury reminds me of the heyday of Emigre magazine, except that we occasionally challenged the status quo, while the Speak Up crowd wants to maintain it as best they can. Today it isn’t cool to go against the grain.” Rudy Vanderlans

Armin, I read your article on Speak Up and I knew that quote sounded very similar. I should have went back and checked the quote that you had in your article, after I transcribed it. I guess Rudy was reading from his own article.

Addendum to #4 above: I’m perfectly aware that on this very site, the individual entry page is different from the home page.

What I want is a site where you can look at an entry from say…March 2004 and immediately know that that’s when it was published as opposed to right now.

I think it is very strange that Rudy puts so much importance on Emigre’s lack of letters to the editor. Actually that whole quote of his doesn’t make much sense to me. It sounds like someone who doesn’t “get the web” as Su pointed out. He views the internet as competition instead of a valuable tool.

Su and pk, Great to talk to you again, and great comments.

Read it again, Felix. I said “understandably arrogant” and “I don’t blame him.” It wasn’t meant to be inflamatory and I don’t think he took it that way. Armin, if you read it as an insult, I apologize.

Coming from Mr. Felix (King of Inflammatory Himself) Sockwell, that is almost humorous.

Speak Up may be THE original, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t original in our own right. Speak Up references a post of ours every once in a while (See Drew’s Female Designers … post) and we reference Speak Up posts. It makes for some good conversations.

Adrian, Fair enough. My bad. I just can’t see calling Armin arrogant going anywhere. Maybe you were trying to bring the funny.

Bennet (Mr Integrity), Arent you the one who used this forum to post your own work a few weeks ago? So, how’d that go? I’d take inflamatory over shameless whore any day.

Chalk up one more for the “why edited publications are better than blogs” category:

Printed magazines rarely allow discussions that devolve into immature namecalling, and which publicly reiterate to the world that all designers are nothing but petulant little brats with no sense of how to function in the actual business community.

Bennett,

I’m not suggesting the editing of comments by a blog’s moderators in any way shape or form. I have a great appreciation for the discussion and honesty afforded by blogs and the blog commenting process. I didn’t present a “solution” to my “criticism” because I thought it was self-evident. I would simply like all of us, myself included, to keep in mind that this is an extremely public forum, and that we are best served if we maintain a civil and professional demeanor. We can hardly go about complaining about the lack of respect we get from the business community while simultaneously taking personal cheap shots at one another in a very public space.

Doesn’t “PK” (Patric[k] King) have his own blog?

Doesn’t he design blogs for a living?

Tsk-tsk.