Recreating old lettering

Hello, my name is Richard, I live in The Netherlands and have been designing fonts since 2005. The whole project started by accident, sort of. A friend of mine had a website about architecture in Amsterdam in the first half of the twentieth century (known as The Amsterdam School). For that he used the Arnold Böcklin, a Jugendstil font. I complained about that choice and asked him why he didn't use an Amsterdam School font (from 1915 to about 1940). His simple reply was: I do not own such a font, do you have a font like that? No, I didn't, so I started from a word on a book cover with only 7 letters and expanded that to a complete alfabet.

I started working with FontCreator a product by High Logic. That went fairly well, until I got a new computer. I contacted the company to get a new activation code. But no, my name was not in their database, so they could not send me the code. Buy a new version of the program, was the advice. Two weeks later there was a mail from the company, highlighting their new version of the software. Wait, my name was no longer in the database? How come they send me this promotion then?

That was the moment I decided to switch to open source. From then on my fonts are made with Font Forge, where I learn new features almost every day. If you are interested in my work you may visit fontenwerkplaats.blogspot.com (texts mostly in Dutch).