AI is revolutionizing font design by making it easier and faster to create custom fonts. Here are a few ways AI is being used in this field:
AI Font Generators: Tools like the AI Font Generator allow users to create custom fonts effortlessly. You can choose from various categories, adjust weights, select styles, and generate downloadable TTF font files. This simplifies the process and provides a creative outlet for unique font designs.
Training Models: AI models are trained on vast collections of existing fonts to understand the characteristics of letters, symbols, and numbers. These models can then generate new fonts based on user-specified keywords or tags.
User-Friendly Web Apps: There are numerous web apps and desktop software options available that cater to different skill levels and budgets. These tools make it accessible for anyone to create visually appealing fonts.
Integration with Design Software: AI tools are often integrated with popular design software like Glyphs, Adobe Illustrator, allowing designers to sketch, scan, and vectorize their custom fonts.
Current AI algorithms don’t address the unique requirements of type design and production. Large language model implementations of AI, which are most familiar to most people, might be useful in prototyping a typeface’s initial visual characteristics. They might also be useful for quickly iterating subsequent variations, but developing those visual ideas into functional fonts lies outside what current versions of AI can do.
I’ll use two analogies to help explain. Artificial intelligence can design new ideas for automobiles, but it can’t engineer and produce an actual automobile. Likewise, artificial intelligence might be able to write passable pieces of music, but it can’t creatively interpret what it wrote for the unique characteristics of various instruments and subsequently play those instruments.
In the coming years, I’m reasonably certain that specialized implementations of AI will be able to do some of the tasks associated with building a font (or engineering an automobile or playing a piece of music). However, at this point, I have a hard time imagining an AI algorithm that could design a font and perform all the various tasks and judgment calls necessary to compile it into a usable and installable font. Going forward, I suspect we will see various implementations of AI incorporated into font production software, but they will address specific tasks rather than being wholesale solutions.
If you want to discuss how AI might impact type design and production, a good place to do so is the TypeDrawers.com forum. Many of the world’s top type designers frequent that forum, including John Hudson, who you referenced.
