Bigelow & Holmes

New Math Book set in Lucida Math fonts

 

We just received a handsome new book set in Lucida Math and Lucida Bright Greek fonts: “Πραγματική Ανάλυση” ["Pragmatiki Analysi" = “Real Analysis”] by Anoussis, Tsolomitis, & Felouzis. From the University of the Aegean on the sunny isle of Samos (ancient birthplace of mathematician Pythagoras, philosopher Epicurus, and astronomer Aristarchus). But this book is indisputably modern: composed with the LuaLaTeX math software derived from Donald Knuth’s popular TeX math composition system. Reminds us of our years working with Don Knuth at sunny Stanford. The book has a rare - probably unique - form of colophon, shaped like an infinity sign, an elegant construction by the mathematical authors. (“Colophon”, by the way, comes from a Greek word.) Also, take a look at the early origins of Lucida Greek, shown in an previous post here, from an article by Kris Holmes, “Designing a New Greek Type”, in the journal Fine Print, July 1987. 

 

 

The elegant colophon reads:

"This book was typeset with LuaLaTeX. The fonts are Lucida Bright and Lucida Sans by Bigelow & Holmes. 

It was printed in 800 copies on chamois paper 85 grams in May of 2014. The final pdf file was 2.1 Mb."

 

Interview with Chuck Bigelow now online

Yue Wang interviews Chuck Bigelow for TUGboat, available as PDF HERE. Here's an excerpt - 

"Digital design tools and rendering enable greater precision and regularity in type forms, but the risk is that the designs look boring — too regulated, too repetitive, too rigid, too homogenized. Randomly adding irregularity doesn’t improve the appearance — the designs then look boring but awkward. Some graphic and interface designers want neutrality in typography, but I don’t believe that any type design is truly neutral. Every typeface carries some degree of expressiveness, even those intended to be plain, simple, and neutral. For example, a user-interface in Helvetica expresses a different feeling than one in Lucida, but the two designs are similar in weight and x-height. Helvetica is more modernist, Lucida more humanist. Helvetica more carved, Lucida, more handwritten. Helvetica more tightly spaced, Lucida more open. A Swiss poet made a memorable comparison of the feeling of Helvetica compared to Syntax Antiqua, a very readable sans-serif typeface by Hans E. Meier, which is even more closely based on humanist handwriting and early Renaissance typography than Lucida. The poet said, when he reads a page in Syntax, it is like walking through a field of flowers, but when reading a page in Helvetica, it is like walking through a field of stones.

So, a problem for future designers will be: how much expressiveness to put into a type. What expression does the design convey to the reader? For the reader, highly expressive typefaces are lively but can look too complex for long texts. Free scripts can look graceful but may seem too undisciplined for modern readers accustomed to rigidly regular fonts."

An illustration from the interview:

 

The Lucida Fonts Store is open

We have opened a store to sell downloadable Lucida Fonts. We offer 310 fonts, most of them never before released and available only from The Lucida Fonts Store.

Check out all the new Lucidas!