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 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.

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 Corporation, 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 Apple, Inc:
New York
Monaco
Geneva
Chancery
Textile
Kolibri
Leviathan
Isadora
Go
Wingdings (along with Charles Bigelow)

Samples of many of these typefaces are available online.

References

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

External links

Short biography (Linotype GmbH)
Short biography (15th Internationalization & Unicode Conference)
Typophile: Kris Holmes
Sloan Student Film Awards (Museum of the Moving Image)
ChloroFilms 2009 contest
Cary Graphic Arts Collection
Frederic W. Goudy Award

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
Women graphic designers
American graphic designers