Wiki: Kris Holmes - upcScavenger

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 and Wingdings font families, among many other typeface designs. She is President and Co-Founder of Bigelow & Holmes Inc., a typeface design studio.

Biography

Early life

Holmes grew up on a farm in Parlier, California. The nearest hospital was in Reedley, so she was born there. 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 lettering with Ed Benguiat as well as modern dance at the Martha Graham and Alwin Nikolais schools. She later studied calligraphy and typeface design with Hermann Zapf at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She received a B.A. from Harvard University and an MFA from UCLA Film School in Animation.

David Consuegra (2011). 9781621535829, Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781621535829

Teaching

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

Design

By far the most well-known typeface design created by Bigelow & Holmes is Lucida. Bigelow and Holmes have written extensively about its original conception and subsequent evolution.

Notable projects include the design of Lucida Grande, at one time 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 (Windows 95 and 98), Lucida Console (Windows NT), TrueType Chicago, Monaco, Geneva, New York, Apple Chancery, Textile, Capitals (Macintosh OS), Lucida Unicode (Java, Solaris, and Lucent Inferno). Font designs have been additionally licensed by Adobe Systems, Agfa, ITC, Hewlett-Packard, Linotype Library, Monotype Typography, and the TeX Users Group. Lucida is also available from Bigelow & Holmes' own web site.

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. She has created many other animated films.

Designed fonts

Lucida Family: Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans, Lucida Console, Lucida Bright, Lucida Handwriting, Lucida Calligraphy, Lucida Casual (along with Charles Bigelow)
For

New York
Monaco
Geneva
Chancery
Textile

Kolibri
Leviathan
Isadora
Go
Wingdings (along with Charles Bigelow)

Samples of many of these typefaces are available online.

Sources

Macmillan, Neil. An A–Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press: 2006. .
Gerda Breuer, Meer, Julia (ed). Women in Graphic Design Jovis, Berlin: 2012, p. 477. .

External links

Categories: Harvard University Alumni, Ucla Film School Alumni, Portland State University Faculty, Pacific Northwest College Of Art Faculty, Otis College Of Art And Design Faculty, Santa Monica College Faculty, Rhode Island School Of Design Faculty, Living People, 1950 Births, Reed College Alumni, People From Reedley, California, American Women Graphic Designers, American Graphic Designers, American Calligraphers, Women Calligraphers, American Animators, American Women Animators

Page 1 of 1

1

Page 1 of 1

1

Kris Holmes

( Harvard University Alumni )

Account

Navigation

Statistics

Kris Holmes ( Harvard University Alumni )

Account

Navigation

Statistics

Kris Holmes

( Harvard University Alumni )