The future of typography is a complex and evolving topic – one that has recently been touched on by AI innovations. Recent attempts at using AI for typography show that the technology is lagging behind, with results appearing garbled and blurry. AI is not yet at the point to rival the complexity of human-designed type, and attempting to force it into this shape will only result in an incomprehensible mess.
Rather than focusing on generative models, AI should be put to use as an assistive tool in typography design. In the same way the digital revolution allowed designers to create more efficiently, AI technology could be employed in a similar manner to make typography more accessible. Systems like Word-as-Image offer interesting concepts, but they come at the cost of sacrificing readability.
Experiments such as Walter Porstmann’s in 1920 Sprache and Schrift, and László Moholy-Nagy’s phonetic proposal from 1925 offer interesting insights into how early designers tried to use technology to advance typography, but often these experiments overlooked human readability altogether. Kurt Schwitters proposed a unicase alphabet in 1927 that used character weight to denote sounds, however this experiment was not particularly successful.
It is clear that AI is not going to reinvent the alphabet anytime soon, and at present it lacks the depth of understanding of how humans read and interpret typefaces. Leveraging AI in the type design process could assist typographers in their efforts to make their work more accessible while ensuring that readability is not compromised.
The company mentioned in this article is Word-As-Image for Semantic Typography, which created a tool to morph text into an image of what the text represents. Founded by anonymous authors, the goal of the tool is to showcase innovative use of AI in typography design.
The person mentioned in this article is László Moholy-Nagy. He was a Hungarian artist, photographer, designer and teacher at the Bauhaus, and is known for his proposal from 1925 that typography must evolve to express new technologies. He was the inspiration for the Word-As-Image design tool.
