Charles A. Bigelow (born July 29, 1945) is an American type historian, professor, and designer. Bigelow grew up in the
Detroit
Detroit ( , ) is the List of municipalities in Michigan, most populous city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is situated on the bank of the Detroit River across from Windsor, Ontario. It had a population of 639,111 at the 2020 United State ...
suburbs and attended the
Cranbrook School in
Bloomfield Hills. He received a
MacArthur Fellowship 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, he is the co-creator of
Lucida and
Wingdings 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 college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland, Portland, Oregon, E ...
and was a professor of digital typography at
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
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. 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 of the RIT Wallace Center.
Designed fonts
*Leviathan
*Syntax Phonetic
*
Lucida
*
Lucida Grande
*Apple Chicago TrueType
*Apple Geneva TrueType
* Apple Monaco TrueType
* Apple New York TrueType
*
Wingdings
*
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 Bigelow
Interview 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
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