Lucida Grande

Lucida Grande
CategorySans-serif
ClassificationHumanist
Designer(s)Charles Bigelow
Kris Holmes
FoundryBigelow & Holmes
Date releasedNovember 16, 1999

Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It is a member of the Lucida family of typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It is best known for its implementation throughout the macOS user interface from 1999 to 2014, as well as in other Apple software like Safari for Windows. As of OS X Yosemite (version 10.10), the system font was changed from Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue.[1] In OS X El Capitan (version 10.11) the system font changed again, this time to San Francisco.[2]

The typeface looks very similar to Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Unicode. Like Sans Unicode, Grande supports the most commonly used characters defined in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard.

Three weights of Lucida Grande: Normal, Bold, and Black, in three styles: Roman, Italic, and Oblique, were developed by Bigelow & Holmes. Apple released the Regular (Normal Roman) and Bold Roman with OS X.

In June, 2014, Bigelow & Holmes released four weights: Light, Normal, Bold, and Black, in three styles: Roman, Italic, and Oblique. B&H also released Narrow versions of those twelve weight/styles, plus four Lucida Grande Monospaced fonts in Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic styles, with narrow versions of the four monospaced weight/styles.[3]

Lucida Grande fonts directly from Bigelow & Holmes contain the pan-European WGL character set.

  1. ^ "Apple changes OS X system font for the first time in Yosemite". 2 June 2014.
  2. ^ "Fonts". Apple Developer. Apple Inc. Retrieved 13 June 2015.
  3. ^ A Brief History of Lucida Grande