Artifact Details

Title

Bigelow, Charles oral history

Catalog Number

102738268

Type

Moving image

Description

The interview with Chuck Bigelow opens with a reflection on the Desktop Publishing meeting which had just concluded. The first half of the interview focuses largely on his biography, with particular emphasis on Bigelow’s upbringing and early education in Detroit and then at Reed College (studying calligraphy under Lloyd Reynolds), as well as his early career in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon which included ongoing intellectual and vocational development. His long-term collaboration with designer Kris Holmes is treated extensively, as is the development of the Lucida family of fonts. The interview then moves into later phases of Bigelow’s career and a range of other topics, including his perspectives on the early personal computer revolution, the “Font Wars,” and the rise of independent type design. Teaching at RISD, Stanford, and RIT is covered, as are industry collaborations and consultations, notably Imagen, Adobe, and Apple. The interview concludes with thoughts on the place of desktop publishing and digital type design in the long history of human communication. Those seeking more technical discussion of Bigelow’s type design are referred to his interview with Yue Wang published in TUGboat 34 (2013): https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb34-2/tb107bigelow-wang.pdf.

Date

2017-05-24

Participants

Bigelow, Charles, Interviewee
Kirschenbaum, Matthew, Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Duration

02:02:41

Format

MOV

Category

Oral history

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X8212.2017
 

Related Records

102738267 Bigelow, Charles oral history