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 recognizing letters set close together. Lucida spacing was influenced by the generous spacing of early roman typefaces, like Jenson’s roman of 1470, which remained legible despite the “noisy” environment of rough paper, easily worn types, and uneven pressures of early printing technology. The generous spacing improves legibility at text sizes (8 point to 14 point) at low resolutions on screens and printers. Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans, and the original Lucida seriffed faces have more space between letters than most modern types.
We produced a series of bitmap fonts, which we called “Pellucida” for screen displays, including on a Smalltalk workstation and on the operating system Plan 9 from Bell Labs. The x-height always seemed most important for letter recognition. Second, the big x-height provides more pixels for better definition of features in the x-height region, which typically carries more information than ascenders and descenders, thus helping distinguish letter shapes for better recognition.īefore designing the Lucida outline characters, we made experiments with hand-edited bitmap renderings of letters at various resolutions to study how high resolution forms devolve into minimalist pixelations at low resolutions. Text on monitors was read at distances 50% greater than on paper, according to ergonomic recommendations of the 1980s. First, a big x-height makes the typeface appear perceptually bigger, aiding legibility when text is viewed at greater than average reading distances or at small sizes, or both.
Lucida’s large x-height has two functions that help it adapt to reading on screens and printing on modest resolution devices.
The x-height of Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans, and all other Lucida fonts is large, approximately 53% of the body size. After these initial paragraphs, we offer further notes including pros and cons, alternative views, personal recollections of our teachers, and a bibliography. Over the past 30 years, some of our reasons have been proven well founded, while others have been irrelevant to trends in typography, and some remain inconclusive. To observe the 30th anniversary of the family, we offer these notes on salient features of the original Lucida fonts, and what we thought when we designed them in the early 1980s. We first wrote about “The Design of Lucida” in 1986, and on “The Design of a Unicode Font” (Lucida Sans Unicode) in 1993. 2014 is the 30th anniversary of the first showing of Lucida, the first family of original, digital typefaces for laser printing and screen displays, so we think it is time to write more about our approach to the design.