Kris Holmes, the designer of 300 typefaces

A woman in the design world who deserves recognition is Kris Homes. She grew up on a farm in Parlier, California in the 1950s, and studied calligraphy at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She then continued her education by studying letterforms in New York. It was here at the Rochester Institute of Technology where Hermann Zapf, designer of Dingbats and other typefaces, mentored her.

During the 1980s, graphic design began shifting into the digital era with the creation of the Apple Macintosh and later Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Consumers' mass adoption of the computer is comparable to the invention of the printing press, creating massive leaps in the evolution of design and typography through widespread use and experimentation. Typographers, like Kris Holmes, began to develop digital typefaces, set to be used solely in combination with photography and illustration.

Kris is a cofounder of Bigelow and Holmes. With Charles “Chuck” Bigelow, she created many typefaces, such as the Lucida font family in 1993. Lucinda intended to be highly legible when printed at a small size or displayed at low resolution. Lucida is arguably their most successful typeface design. It has been popularly used in computer operating systems like Macintosh OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Plan 9 from Bell Labs. On top of that, it has been expanded into multiple languages; such as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, and Devanagari scripts.

In addition to Lucida, Bigelow and Holmes studio has designed a variety of other fonts for Apple together and have become pioneers in modern typeface design. Kris is currently the principal artist at Bigelow & Holmes and is responsible for creating over 300 typefaces, many of which are still available today.

She has also mentored and inspired Carol Twombly, a type designer known for creating Trajan and other revival fonts for Adobe. Kris’s illustrations have appeared in various magazines such as Scientific American, Computer Graphics, and more. In addition, she has designed signage for such names as Ghirardelli Square and more.