I even played a bit with the 'drawing' tools in FontLab - or maybe it was the little-brother consumer version TypeTool - and did something derived from the traditional Scandinavian farmer's style called Kurbits in Swedish, Rose-painting in Norwegian: of course it's nothing like painting on sheep-skin with home-made paint made of natural pigments and rye-flour, but it would be silly to expect that, it's quite simply a different kind of aesthetic experience, and this gives absolutely the taste to continue and do a whole font of them. I put it together with that new 10-minute Roundhand in this version 3 of my logo sketch. I suppose it's too fussy with too many things in it, but I'm not quite ready to 'kill my darlings' yet.

Later: oh well, now there's a version 4 with only the poppy; and I extended the cross-bar of the 'e' to meet the main stem, too, and moved the 'e' and the 'w' so they sat on the baseline, which they didn't before ...

I'm what they call a late developer ... After two months I've just realised that you don't have to just accept the auto-trace of the outlines which the programmes do, but you can start with those and then refine them with the drawings tools ... When I thought I'd finished Karin's Free Lombardy Drop Caps, they didn't match very well: some of them were much blacker than the others. Ho hum.

When I was doing something else it suddenly struck me that they had to be separate styles, so I saved a copy of the database-file, called them 'bold' and 'fine', took away the fine letters in the bold file and the bold letters in the fine file and made the ones that were missing: it wasn't quite twice as much work as I'd expected, once I got going. You get the bold ones by typing capitals, the fine one by typing lower case

- that's the small letters: apparently the old printers did actually have their type bits in two cases, one above the other, the capitals in the upper one, the smalls in the lower case - upper case, lower case ... where on earth did I read that?!

I've done a special proof for these fonts that have only capitals, 25 short phrases each starting with a different letter. Sizes and spacing needs refining, of course, but it's fun to have something done at last, it's been on the list of jobs for about five years!

Then of course you can add all kinds of effects in Photoshop; and the wonderful thing about fonts is that they work at any size ...