Charles Bigelow is an acclaimed American type designer, educator, and historian, celebrated for his groundbreaking contributions to digital typography. Alongside his collaborator Kris Holmes, he co-created the Lucida type family, one of the first typefaces optimized for digital environments.

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Bigelow's artistic interests were nurtured from an early age. His father, an amateur painter, exposed him to art museums, sparking a lifelong fascination with visual design.
Bigelow pursued anthropology at Reed College in Oregon but was deeply influenced by a graphic design course, where he learned calligraphy and the history of writing. This formative experience laid the foundation for his later innovations in type design. In his early 30s, Bigelow encountered dot matrix printers and noticed significant challenges with traditional typefaces on low-resolution screens. The spacing of classic fonts caused letters to merge, leading to illegible text—a problem that spurred his exploration of digital typography.

In the early 1980s, Bigelow authored influential articles on the evolution of type design for digital platforms. These writings brought him recognition, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982, awarded for the visionary potential of his work. Shortly afterward, he joined Stanford University as an associate professor of digital typography, a position he held until 1995. While at Stanford, he organized the seminal 1983 international seminar “The Computer and the Hand in Type Design,“ which bridged the gap between traditional craftsmanship and emerging computer technologies.

After leaving Stanford, Bigelow accepted the Melbert B. Cary Distinguished Professorship at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2006. There, he co-organized symposia on the future of reading and typography in the digital age. He retired in 2012 but continues to contribute to the field as Cary Scholar in Residence at RIT's Cary Graphic Arts Collection. (hs)