The roman was the starting point of Dolly's design, and all other weights were developed to work together with this weight. The roman is of a sturdy, legible color and has a relative low stroke-contrast, which makes for the comfortable reading of long texts at small sizes. The calligraphic influence on the construction of the curves and the asymmetrically rounded serifs give the type a friendly but contemporary look.
The italic is designed to emphasize words within roman text. The angle, the width, the darkness and the curliness are designed to make one or a few words set in italic look just different enough from the roman text to stand out, without disturbing readability.
Two other versions were made before the final version was designed.
The bold weight is also designed to work together with roman text. At first glance it might look quite heavy to some people, but its main function is to stress individual words set in bold amidst a body of roman weight text. If the bold were lighter, there would not be enough contrast to make the bold characters pop out.
The small caps are designed to function in words or sentences. This provides options for setting acronyms, titles, initials etc., which may sit in a body of text where the use of Roman capitals would draw too much attention. The roman captials' main function is to work well together with lowercase characters as opposed to sitting beside other capital letters.
The complete family looks like this.