Kris Holmes


Kris Holmes is a typeface designer, calligrapher, type design educator and animator. She, with Charles Bigelow, is the co-creator of the Lucida font family. She is President of Bigelow & Holmes Inc., a typeface design studio.

Biography

Early life

At Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Holmes studied calligraphy with Calligrapher Laureate of Oregon Lloyd J. Reynolds and modern dance with Judy Massee. In New York, she then continued her education by studying calligraphy and type design with Hermann Zapf and typeface design with Ed Benguiat as well as modern dance at the Martha Graham and Alwin Nikolais schools. She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her MFA from UCLA Film School in Animation.

Teaching

She has taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology in both the Graphic Design and the Film Departments, Portland State University, the Museum Art School, Rhode Island School of Design, Santa Monica College, and the Otis College of Art and Design.

Design

Recent projects include the design of Lucida Grande, the system font for Apple Computer's OS X Operating System and the creation of the core fonts of the Java 2 language and developer kit for Sun Microsystems. These multilingual fonts cover five scripts, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic, and twelve styles, comprising 10,000 characters in all. Other computer platform clients include the Microsoft Corporation, Sun Microsystems’ Solaris division, and Lucent Technologies. Font designs include: Microsoft Wingdings, Lucida Console, TrueType Chicago, Monaco, Geneva, New York, Apple Chancery, Textile, Capitals, Lucida Unicode. Font designs additionally licensed by Adobe Systems, Agfa Corporation, ITC, Hewlett Packard, Linotype Library, and Monotype Typography.
As the principal artist at Bigelow & Holmes, Holmes is responsible for the creation of over 100 digital typefaces, including conception, research, drawing, computer input, digital editing, and production management. Her illustrations have appeared in Scientific American, The Seybold Report, Computer Graphics, Fine Print and other publications. She has designed signage for Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco and Walter Lantz Studio, UCLA. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Klingspor Museum, Germany and the Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.
Kris Holmes received the 2012 RIT Frederic W. Goudy Award for excellence in typography and gave the keynote address at the 2012 RIT Reading Digital Symposium.

Film

Her screenplay, Vavilov, won a 2002 UCLA Sloan Foundation Student Film Award. She is the creator of the animated film La Bloomba, which was awarded a First Prize in the ChloroFilms 2009 contest.

Designed fonts