I’ve just idly been reminded of something by John Gruber, in his piece about the book Make Something Wonderful, and the brand new font it’s typeset in:
It has occurred to me several times during this stretch how much I miss Dean Allen, and specifically, herewith, I crave his thoughts on both the typeface and the book. Re-reading for the umpteenth time Twenty Faces, Dean’s remarkably concise and compelling “survey of available text typefaces”, I was reminded that his entry on ITC Baskerville points also to Mrs Eaves, Zuzana Licko’s inspired 1996 revival (has it been that long? I will forever think of Mrs Eaves as a “new” typeface), which Dean described thus: “an interesting if mannered experiment in reviving Baskerville by aping the unpredictability of form found in letterpress text.”
And it strikes me how, five years on from the death of Dean Allen, there is absolutely no proper archive of Dean’s writing. In order to quote his thoughts above, Gruber was forced to scrabble around on the Wayback Machine. Of course, it’s amazing that the Wayback Machine exists, and gives us as much as it does. But it isn’t – and never can be – the solution to everything. Its archives are very much an imperfect, broken representation of a man who deeply cared about how websites not only looked, but worked.
It feels like he deserves a better legacy than that.