Most typefaces start on a grid. This one started on a trip to Texas.

I was down there for my best friend's fortieth birthday. At some point over the weekend, his daughter got into my sketchbook — found the pages where I doodle letters in the margins, the stuff I mess with when I'm not really "working." She wanted to know what it all was.

So I handed her a page and asked her to draw me an alphabet. No rules, no reference. Just twenty-six letters the way she saw them.

What came back wasn't neat, and it wasn't supposed to be — thick strokes, uneven edges, letters a little too big for the page. Exactly how you draw when nobody's told you yet that you're supposed to color inside the lines.

I kept that page. For a while it just sat there, a kid's alphabet in a sketchbook. Then it turned into something else — I traced it, cleaned up just enough to make it work as an actual typeface, and kept everything that made it hers.

Every letterform here is real artwork — actual hand-built letterforms, not a placeholder, not a filter, not a font-generator trick.

One drawing became a letter. One letter became an alphabet. One alphabet became Lady Mae, chunky edges and all.

This one wasn't built to fill a gap in a font catalog. It exists because a kid asked a good question on a porch in Texas, and the honest answer turned out to be worth building.