Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow designed Lucida Calligraphy, a chancery cursive script typeface family. It’s a very legible and readable typeface that can be used both on screen and in print. Lucida calligraphy was only available in one weight at first. It now comes in five different weights, ranging from thin to black. Bigelow and Holmes’ Lucida calligraphy typeface is part of the Lucida collection of fonts. Lucida is well known for its legibility and wide selection of letter styles.

Lucida Family

Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans, and all other Lucida fonts have a huge x-height, almost 53% of the body size. The large x-height of Lucida serves two important purposes: it adapts to reading on screens and printing on low-resolution devices. For starters, a large x-height makes the typeface appear perceptually larger, which improves legibility when text is viewed at higher than typical reading distances, small sizes, or both. According to ergonomic standards from the 1980s, text on displays was viewed at 50 percent greater distances than text on paper. Second, the large x-height gives more pixels for greater delineation of characteristics in the x-height area, which often contains more information than ascenders and descenders, allowing for better recognition of letter shapes. https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2014/10/how-and-why-we-designed-lucida.html

The Lucida family is also known for its generous spacing between letters unlike many other typefaces. this was influenced by the spacing of early roman typefaces. ‘Also, Lucida spacing is partly based on adjustments for three visual phenomena: “optical scale”, a traditional craft adjustment of letter shapes for different sizes, which included wider spacing for small sizes; tuning the base spatial frequency, the alternation of black strokes and white spaces, to the peak sensitivity of the human visual system; and compensation for “crowding”, a problem recognising letters set close together.’ https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2014/10/how-and-why-we-designed-lucida.html