While she was designing the Emigre website, Zuzana Licko had the idea of first creating a readable (bitmapped) screen font, and then taking that as the basis for the (vectorised) printer font. She started with the standard font size of 12 points, and gave the x-height 6 pixels and the PostScript em quad the maximum possible 1200 units – the metrics for Base 12.


Base 9 is the result of an unusual experiment

She then designed a Base 9, so that between them the two fonts covered the popular 9-, 12-, 18-, 24- and 36-point font sizes on the screen in full pixels. While drafting the vectorised printer fonts, Zuzana Licko once again demonstrated her talent for eliciting maximum aesthetic yield from suboptimal technical circumstances. Base’s highly idiosyncratic style has gained it much acclaim.