excerpts from Rick Bradley's published fonts: click on a thumbnail picture for a larger view in a new window

This New Year, 2006, I was delighted to hear from one of the established professional type-designers, whose work is represented in major catalogues like Linotype, ITC and Letraset: Rick Bradley. I even felt I knew him a bit already, because I had one of his fonts on my system, Bradley Hand. He has previously worked on paper and was interested in exploring how he might produce some of his ideas in the form of computer fonts; while he's busy getting a handle on Fontographer for himself, I thought it would be fun to see what came out if I had a look at his inspiring calligraphic work.

It really was a New Year - it's ages since I did anything with fonts, and Rick was quite justly skeptical about the technical quality of my first results and felt we would need to spend a good long time together tweaking all the details. It didn't seem a very practical proposition with me in the north of Sweden and him in Portsmouth, I was thinking it was a case for using Skype to bring us together: but even after only a week he said I'd got much better at it and he was ready to consider moving forwards despite the distance, and agreed to my using one of the fonts for the captions on a DVD of a local choir. It should perhaps be said that this was a week when I was so stimulated and excited by what was happening that I was only sleeping about three hours a night. Type can get you like that, not to mention being encouraged by a professional designer.

- click on a thumbnail picture for a larger view in a new window