If I'm overcome with a fit of madness I might try an x-bold, but that will involve quite a bit of messing about.


Flushed with success, I'm confident I can get a light and a demi out of it too. That's if I can stand doing 190+ glyphs of the same font four times...

For the present I shall just bang away at finishing the bold. Maybe I'm finally growing up, actually finishing something instead of flitting onto the next thing.

Later... the fatal realisation:

Hmm. Comparing the two side-by-side I realise it's not so fantastic after all. Ha ha! What are cracks in the plain become fissures in the bold. The cap N. Thick-thin indecisiveness. And a generally klunky look.

Damn! There's more to this font business than I bargained for! How hard can it be? Well, very hard.

Well, as the author of the sublime Chesterfield family I'm flattered you think it's worth my persevering with poor old James.

It's funny, isn't it, how intoxicated with your own brilliance you can become as you're creating the font: brimming with enthusiasm, confidence and hubris. But 24 hours later and it all looks like turd, and you're sick of the sight of it.

FontStruct brings out the bipolar in me. There I go, blaming an external...

I'll feel better about it when I download the fonts and muck about with them in InDesign, persuading myself they really aren't quite the worst fonts I've ever spawned.

That cap N bugs me. I don't know how to fix it.

Thalamic you're a lifesaver. And not just because you gift me solutions!

I'm having a very blue time of it at the moment, but I've just got to get over myself.

I found it:

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the shadow

The Hollow Men, TSlash Yourwrists.

Do you think I should do away with the notch? Is it too unspeakably awful?

A sampler of progress on Plain James.
My download must have had a glitch in it -- nothing wrong with the lower case j, apparently.