Bigelow & Holmes Blog

Hans Eduard Meier died last week, July 15, 2014, age 91.  Through his teaching, books, and type designs, the Swiss lettering artist Hans Eduard Meier enriched the realm of letters for over 60 years. In his person, he was humble, thoughtful, kind, and generous. In his art, he was visionary yet disciplined; in his craftsmanship, meticulous yet sensual. His understanding of letters spanned two millennia; through long practice, he taught himself to write the forms of Latin letters from their earliest beginnings, through medieval and Renaissance scripts, up to the design of metal, photo, and digital fonts. Yet, he did...

RIDT (Raster Imaging and Digital Typography) is the title of a series of conferences on electronic publishing that were organized in the 1980s and 1990s, when digital typography emerged from research laboratories and became widely used. State-of-the-art research, techniques, and solutions in digital typography and image rasterization were presented in these conferences. RIDT ’91 took place in Boston, Massachusetts, October 14-16, 1991. The conference chair was Robert A. Morris and vice-char was Roger D. Hersch. The day before the technical presentations, Jacobo Valdes gave a tutorial on type rasterization, and Kris Holmes and Hans Ed. Meier gave a tutorial on...

IN SHORT In 1993, Bigelow & Holmes designed a font named Lucida* Casual Italic, based on informal handwriting. In 1998, B&H designed for Apple a font named Textile* which looked like a sumo wrestler version of Lucida Casual Italic - bigger, bolder, brawnier. In 2014, Bigelow & Holmes released a font named Lucida Marker, which is a dead ringer for Textile. Here’s the story. DESIGN PROCESS In 1990-91, Bigelow & Holmes created Lucida Handwriting, an informal joining script. The font became widely used after its release by Microsoft in 1992. Some two years later, we designed two informal, non-joining fonts...

TYPOGRAPHY & DYSLEXIA Fonts that purportedly ameliorate dyslexia have recently been featured in blogs and on-line news media: Slate (Nov. 10, 2014, with correction Nov. 12), NPR (Nov. 11, 2014), USA Today (Nov 12, 2014), The Guardian (Nov. 12, 2014), and an earlier post in Scientific American (October 26, 2011).  What is missing from these news reports is scientific evidence that special dyslexia fonts are actually better for dyslexic readers than commonly used fonts.  In preparing a literature review on dyslexia and typography for a major font vendor, I surveyed more than fifty scientific papers and books about dyslexia, paying...

For readers wishing to dig deeper into Typography & Dyslexia, the subject of previous B&H post, here are urls for papers cited in approximate order of that in the original post. More scientific studies of typography and dyslexia are ongoing, and some are in other languages not yet translated into English, so in the future, additional publications may confirm, contradict, or augment what is described in the blog post.  Renske de Leeuw (2010), “Special Font For Dyslexia?”, Master’s Thesis, University of Twente, Holland. http://essay.utwente.nl/60474/1/MA_thesis_R_Leeuw.pdf Tineke Pijpker (2013), “Reading performance of dyslexics with a special font and a colored background”, Master’s Thesis, University...