{"id":205995,"date":"2025-06-22T20:53:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T20:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/205995\/"},"modified":"2025-06-22T20:53:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-22T20:53:10","slug":"what-happens-when-ai-comes-for-our-fonts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/205995\/","title":{"rendered":"What happens when AI comes for our fonts?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monotype is keen for you to know what AI might do in typography. As one of the largest type design companies in the world, Monotype owns Helvetica, Futura, and Gill Sans \u2014 among 250,000 other fonts. In the typography giant\u2019s 2025 Re:Vision trends report<\/a>, published in February, Monotype devotes an entire chapter to how AI will result in a reactive typography that will \u201cleverage emotional and psychological data\u201d to tailor itself to the reader. It might bring text into focus when you look at it and soften when your gaze drifts. It could shift typefaces depending on the time of day and light level. It could even adapt to reading speeds and emphasize the important portions of online text for greater engagement. AI, the report suggests, will make type accessible through \u201cintelligent agents and chatbots\u201d and let anyone generate typography regardless of training or design proficiency. How that will be deployed isn\u2019t certain, possibly as part of proprietarily trained apps. Indeed, how any of this will work remains nebulous.<\/p>\n

Monotype isn\u2019t alone in this kind of speculation. Typographers are keeping a close eye on AI as designers start to adopt tools like Midjourney for ideation and Replit for coding, and explore the potential of GPTs in their workflow. All over the art and design space, creatives are joining the ongoing gold rush to find the use case of AI in type design. This search continues both speculatively and, in some places, adversarially as creatives push back against the idea that creativity itself is the bottleneck that we need to optimize out of the process.<\/p>\n

That idea of optimization echoes where we were a hundred years ago. In the early 20th century, creatives came together to debate the implications of rapid industrialization in Europe on art and typography at the Deutscher Werkbund (German alliance of craftspeople). Some of those artists rejected the idea of mass production and what it offered artists, while others went all in, leading to the founding of the Bauhaus. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s almost as if we are being gaslighted into believing our lives, or our professions, or our creative skills are ephemeral.\u201d<\/p>\n

The latter posed multiple vague questions on what the industrialization of typography might mean, with few real ideas of how those questions might be answered. Will typography remain on the page or will it take advantage of advances in radio to be both text and sound? Could we develop a universal typeface that is applicable to any and all contexts? In the end, those experiments amounted to little and the questions were closed, and the real advances were in the efficiency of both manufacturing and the design process. Monotype might be reopening those old questions, but it is still realistic about AI in the near future.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur chief focus is connecting people to the type that they need \u2014 everywhere,\u201d says Charles Nix, senior executive creative director at Monotype, and one of Re:Vision\u2019s authors. This is nothing new for Monotype, which has been training its similarity engine to recognize typefaces since 2015. <\/p>\n

But the broader possibilities, Nix says, are endless, and that\u2019s what makes being a typographer now so exciting. \u201cI think that at either end of the parentheses of AI are human beings who are looking for novel solutions to problems to use their skills as designers,\u201d he says. \u201cYou don\u2019t get these opportunities many times in the course of one\u2019s life, to see a radical shift in the way technology plays within not only your industry, but a lot of industries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not everyone is sold. For Zeynep Akay, creative director at typeface design studio Dalton Maag<\/a>, the results simply aren\u2019t there to justify getting too excited. That\u2019s not to say Dalton Maag rejects AI; the assistive potential of AI is significant. Dalton Maag is exploring using AI to mitigate the repetitive tasks of type design that slow down creativity, like building kern tables, writing OpenType features, and diagnosing font issues. But many designers remain tempered about the prospect of relinquishing creative control to generative AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s almost as if we are being gaslighted into believing our lives, or our professions, or our creative skills are ephemeral,\u201d Akay says. She is yet to see how its generative applications promise a better creative future. \u201cIt\u2019s a future in which, arguably, all human intellectual undertaking is shed over time, and handed over to AI \u2014 and what we gain in return isn\u2019t altogether clear,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n

For his part, Nix agrees: the more realistic and realizable use of AI is the streamlining of what he calls the \u201creally pedantic\u201d work of typography. AI might flatten the barrier to entry in design and typography, he says, but \u201ccreative thinking, that state of being a creative being, that\u2019s still there regardless of what we do with the mechanism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThirty-five years ago there was a similar sort of thought that introducing computing to design would end up replacing designers,\u201d he continues. \u201cBut for all of us who have spent the last 35 years creating design using computers, it has not diminished our creativity at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor all of us who have spent the last 35 years creating design using computers, it has not diminished our creativity at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

That shift to digital type was the result of a clear and discernible need to improve typographic workflow from setting type by hand to something more immediate, Akay says. In the current space, however, we\u2019ve arrived at the paintbrush before knowing how the canvas appears. As powerful as AI could be, where in our workflow it should be deployed is yet to be understood \u2014 if it should be deployed at all, given the less-than-stellar results we\u2019re seeing in the broader spectrum of generative AI. That lack of direction makes her wonder whether a better analog isn\u2019t the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.<\/p>\n

In many ways, it mirrors our current situation with AI. As public access to the internet increased, a wave of dot-com startups emerged and with them increased venture capital, even though the internet at the time \u201cnever connected to a practical consumer need,\u201d Akay says. Overvalued and without a problem to solve or a meaningful connection to consumers, many of those startups crashed in 2000. \u201cBut [the internet] came back at a time when there were actual problems to solve,\u201d she adds. <\/p>\n

Similarly, few consumers exploring AI are professional designers trying to optimize workflow; rather, AI is increasingly the playground \u2014 and product \u2014 of executives overvaluing AI as they attempt to automate jobs and try to push creativity out of creative professions.<\/p>\n

Both Nix and Akay agree a similar crash around AI might actually be beneficial in pushing some of those venture capitalist interests out of AI. For Nix, however, just because its practical need isn\u2019t immediately obvious doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not there or, at least, won\u2019t become apparent soon. Nix suggests that it may well be beyond the bounds of our current field of vision.<\/p>\n

Nix adds that in our Western-focused view of AI, we might not see the difference in our expansive selection of typefaces and how limited those choices might be for non-Latin scripts, for instance. That, and similar areas outside the Western mainstream of design, may be where the need for change is more apparent. \u201cThe periphery may end up driving the need-state [for AI].\u201d<\/p>\n

For all that, it remains unlikely that current models of selling typography will change, however. We\u2019d still be licensing fonts from companies like Monotype and Dalton Maag. But in this AI-driven process, these generative apps may well be folded into existing typography subscriptions and licensing costs passed on to us through payment of those subscription fees. <\/p>\n

Though, that remains more speculation. We are simply so early on this that the only AI tools we can actually demonstrate are font identification tools like WhatTheFont and related ideas like TypeMixer.xyz<\/a>. It\u2019s not possible to accurately comprehend what such nascent technology will do based solely on what it does now \u2014 it\u2019s like trying to understand a four-dimensional shape. \u201cWhat was defined as type in 1965 is radically different from what we define as type in 2025,\u201d Nix adds. \u201cWe\u2019re primed to know that those things are possible to change, and that they will change. But it\u2019s hard at this stage to sort of see how much of our current workflows we preserve, how much of our current understanding and definition of typography we preserve.\u201dBut as we explore, it\u2019s important not to get caught up with the spectacle of what it looks like AI can do. It may seem romantic to those who have already committed to AI at all costs, but Akay suggests this isn\u2019t just about mechanics, that creativity is valuable \u201cbecause it isn\u2019t easy or fast, but rather because it is traditionally the result of work, consideration, and risk.\u201d We cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube, but, she adds, in an uncertain future and workflow, \u201cthat doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s built on firm, impartial foundations, nor does it mean we have to be reckless in the present.\u201d<\/p>\n

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