The transformation was not accomplished all at once, but by a process of progressive modification and refinement over time (following Twain’s dictum about giving a round man time to change his shape).

So, we transformed Lucida Casual Italic from a light, sprightly alphabet into a heavyweight contender we called “Lucida Big Casual”. We began by experimenting with Lucida Casual Italic, which had the free spirit we wanted and a big x-height (same as Lucida Grande), but it did not have the bigger x-height, greater boldness, and narrower width needed for a system font in the Chicago class. On the low resolution computer monitors of the 1990s, a font needed a big x-height to be easily readable at screen reading distances that were 25% to 50% greater than for reading on paper.

We were puzzled about how to fit a loose, playful design into a procrustean metric bed, but then we thought of Mark Twain’s remark that, “A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. It needed to look as big as Chicago and had to conform closely to the average width of Chicago, so that substituting the new font in the system would not cause line length overflows in menus, messages and texts. We felt certain that a casual italic could have the desired playful look, but a problem was that the font had to be “cabined, cribbed, confined,” as Shakespeare’s Macbeth complained about his plight. The new font was to be part of one of the themes. We began work on the fun-loving new font when Apple’s “Copland” operating system was being developed to include an “Appearance Manager” that let users switch between different graphic themes in the user interface, changing system fonts, graphics, and effects.

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