Every so often, I hear from friends that they miss the old Typographica website. I don’t miss it at all; rather, I suspect that its editor has something big up his sleve for the future. Rather, I miss Daidala.com. Jon Coltz was one of the typographic voices I enjoyed most on the web. Daidala was intensely personal; its spirit was—and still is—an inspiration. I always felt like I could identify with Daidala’s posts… who hasn’t been star-struck by a designer we admire, as Jon was with Veronika? Or terrified meeting a famous person (in this case, Matthew Carter). I saw Zuzana Licko at the ATypI 2004 conference in Prage, but unlike Jon, I never got to courage to speak to her.
Have you ever been discouraged after learning that one of your favorite metal typefaces has been poorly revived in digital form, and won’t ever print dark enough? What about designer envy? And why don’t more people just use a certain awesome typefaces?
Then there were the longer articles, like this second part of a series about about Kis-derived designs. Or the many interviews, like Jon’s 2003 interview with FontBureau’s Dyana Weissman. The last post at Daidala is from 2006, but I still visit the site at least once a month and hope.