What I remember with most pleasure about growing up were two nearby museums, the Cranbrook Institute of Science and the Cranbrook Art Museum. My parents sent me to Cranbrook because I loved science. After that, we moved to a small neighborhood in Beverly Hills. In a way, it was an introduction to a world that was on its way out. In the wintertime, we’d go on sleigh rides pulled by my grandpa’s dappled white and gray horses. My first memories are of the countryside. Hour Detroit: What are some of your memories from growing up in Michigan?Ĭhuck Bigelow: Until I was 3, my parents and I lived on my grandparents’ farm on Wattles Road in Troy.

But before he rose to prominence as a type historian, educator, and creator, Bigelow was a native of Troy and a precocious Cranbrook student whose curiosity often led him to rebel against the institution’s regimented ways.īigelow, now 76 and writing a book called Our Work about his and Holmes’ body of font work, talked to Hour Detroit about his Michigan roots, how his love of writing and science led him to typography, and what qualities make a great font. The duo’s goal was to make text easy to read in a lower-tech era of printing.Īt the time he co-designed Lucida and several other font families, Bigelow was a typography professor at Stanford University and a recent recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, aka the Genius Grant. The name is intended to evoke the typeface’s lucidity it’s known for clear lines and legibility as well as tall lowercase letters. He and his partner in typography, Kris Holmes, released the font in 1984. Or, as you probably are more familiar, Lucida Sans, Lucida Bright, and Lucida Sans Unicode. Most font fanatics - yes, they exist - know Chuck Bigelow is the man behind one of the oldest typeface families still in use: Lucida.

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