Base 9 & 12
Emigre · Zuzana Licko · 1995
Zuzana Licko's 1995 family designed around the pixel constraints of 9 and 12-point screen rendering, producing distinct sans and serif subfamilies united by their grid-based origins.
About
Base 9 & 12 emerged from Licko's long-standing interest in the formal possibilities of low-resolution grids, treating bitmap limitations as a design principle rather than a problem to overcome. The family divides into three subfamilies: Base 9 Sans and two Base 12 cuts, one sans and one serif, each with Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. The resulting letterforms carry a deliberately mechanical rigidity that proved highly influential in 1990s digital typography.
Classification
Designed from bitmap grid constraints at 9 and 12 pixel sizes, the family encompasses both sans and serif subfamilies. The pixel-origin logic places it in a display/bitmap-derived tradition, though the sans cuts are the primary classification anchor.