Charles A. Bigelow (born July 29, 1945, in

Detroit, Michigan Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at ...

) is an American type historian, professor, and designer. Bigelow grew up in the

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at t ...

suburbs and attended the Cranbrook School in

Bloomfield Hills Bloomfield Hills is a small city (5.04 sq. miles) in Oakland County in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is a northern suburb of Metro Detroit and is approximately northwest of Downtown Detroit. Except a small southern border with the city of Bir ...

. He received a

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

in 1982, the Frederic W. Goudy Award in 1987, Sloan Science and Film screenwriting awards in 2001 and 2002, and other honors. Along with

Kris Holmes Kris Holmes (born 1950, Reedley, California) is an American typeface designer, calligrapher, type design educator and animator. She, with Charles Bigelow, is the co-creator of the Lucida font family, among many other typeface designs. She is Pre ...

, he is the co-creator of

Lucida Lucida (pronunciation: ) is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards. The family is intended to be extremely legible when printed at small size or displayed on a low-resol ...

and

Wingdings Wingdings is a series of dingbat fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Ce ...

font families. He is a principal of the Bigelow and Holmes studio. Bigelow received a BA in anthropology in

Reed College Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, with Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at ...

and was a professor of digital typography at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

from 1982 to 1995. As president of the Committee on Letterform Research and Education of ATypI, he organized the first international seminar on digital type design: "The Computer and the Hand in Type Design", at Stanford in 1983. In mid-2006, Bigelow was appointed to the Melbert B. Cary Distinguished Professorship at

Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a private research university in the town of Henrietta in the Rochester, New York, metropolitan area. The university offers undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional ...

. At RIT, he co-organized the 2010 international symposium on "The Future of Reading" and the 2012 "Reading Digital" symposium, in which type designers, publication designers, and vision scientists discussed the present and future of reading on digital devices. He retired from teaching at RIT in 2012, and is currently Cary Scholar in Residence at the

Cary Graphic Arts Collection The Cary Graphic Arts Collection is a library and archive of books, type specimens, manuscripts, documents, and artifacts related to the history of graphical communication. Located in Wallace Library at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) ...

of the RIT Wallace Center.

Designed fonts

*Leviathan *Syntax Phonetic *

Lucida Grande Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It is a member of the Lucida family of typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It is best known for its implementation throughout the macOS user interface from 1999 to 2014, as ...

*Apple Chicago TrueType *Apple Geneva TrueType * Apple Monaco TrueType * Apple New York TrueType *

* Go

Publications

The design of a Unicode fontNotes on Apple 4 FontsNotes on typeface protection, TUGboat 7:3, 1986Oh, oh, zero, TUGboat 34:2, 2013A letter on the persistence of ebooks, TUGboat 35:3, 2014About the DK versions of Lucida, TUGboat 36:3, 2015

References

*Macmillan, Neil. ''An A–Z of Type Designers.'' Yale University Press: 2006. .

External links

Identifont: Charles BigelowInterview with Charles Bigelow (by Yue Wang)
1945 births Living people American graphic designers American typographers and type designers MacArthur Fellows Artists from Detroit Rochester Institute of Technology faculty Reed College alumni {{graphic-designer-stub