Lucida

Lucida is a font family that includes serif, sans-serif and handwritten variants. Its versatility got it on my list of interesting fonts.

What does Lucida look like?

Lucida Roman
Lucida Roman
Lucida Sans Regular
Lucida Sans Regular
Lucida Sans Demibold
Lucida Sans Demibold
Lucida Sans Italic
Lucida Sans Italic
Lucida Handwriting
Lucida Handwriting

What do you use Lucida for?

The Lucida font family includes such an extensive range of styles that it is very versatile. Its best usage cannot be pinned down to a specific type of application.

The history of Lucida

Lucida was designed by the Bigelow & Holmes design studio in 1985.  Charles Bigelow is an American type historian, professor, and designer. Kris Holmes coauthored Chicago, Geneva, Monaco, and New York, the original Macintosh city fonts. Both designers wanted to create a font family that gave nice output on laser printers and displays, was available in a wide range of variants and weights, and included many mathematical symbols. Over the years they extended the font family which now includes serif, sans-serif, blackletter, calligraphic, mono-spaced, handwritten, casual, and fax-optimized variants.

Trivia

Microsoft licensed the icons and symbols from Lucida for their Wingdings font.

Other sources of information

There is a boring Wikipedia page on Lucida. Add a comment if you know of a nice page about Lucida.

5 thoughts on “Lucida

  1. Lucida as in the dictionary entry for lucid: clear, rational, understandable. Self-evident, both in function and beauty. I’ve used Lucida Bright for text in paragraphs for years. Readability is at a maximum with a vertical line space 20% higher than the tallest letter. Readability is evaluated empirically based on eye-tracking, particularly the turn between the end of a line on the right and the resumption of reading the next line on the left. Lucida Bright is well-suited for laser printers that use 8.5 by 11-inch paper.

  2. How exactly did the Bigelow and Holmes mean for the word “Lucida” to be pronounced? No one seems to know for sure.

  3. I find Lucida is very readable down to 9 pt. Its has a fairly sober appearance, which seems more suitable for non-fictional texts than for fiction.

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