Monotype is eager so that you can know what AI would possibly do in typography. As one of many largest sort design firms on the planet, Monotype owns Helvetica, Futura, and Gill Sans — amongst 250,000 different fonts. Within the typography big’s 2025 Re:Imaginative and prescient traits report, printed in February, Monotype devotes a complete chapter to how AI will lead to a reactive typography that can “leverage emotional and psychological knowledge” to tailor itself to the reader. It’d carry textual content into focus if you have a look at it and soften when your gaze drifts. It might shift typefaces relying on the time of day and light-weight degree. It might even adapt to studying speeds and emphasize the essential parts of on-line textual content for higher engagement. AI, the report suggests, will make sort accessible via “clever brokers and chatbots” and let anybody generate typography no matter coaching or design proficiency. How that will likely be deployed isn’t sure, probably as a part of proprietarily educated apps. Certainly, how any of it will work stays nebulous.
Monotype isn’t alone in this type of hypothesis. Typographers are preserving an in depth eye on AI as designers begin to undertake instruments like Midjourney for ideation and Replit for coding, and discover the potential of GPTs of their workflow. All around the artwork and design house, creatives are becoming a member of the continued gold rush to search out the use case of AI in sort design. This search continues each speculatively and, in some locations, adversarially as creatives push again towards the concept that creativity itself is the bottleneck that we have to optimize out of the method.
That concept of optimization echoes the place we had been 100 years in the past. Within the early twentieth century, creatives got here collectively to debate the implications of speedy industrialization in Europe on artwork and typography on the Deutscher Werkbund (German alliance of craftspeople). A few of these artists rejected the concept of mass manufacturing and what it supplied artists, whereas others went all in, resulting in the founding of the Bauhaus.
“It’s virtually as if we’re being gaslighted into believing our lives, or our professions, or our inventive abilities are ephemeral.”
The latter posed a number of imprecise questions on what the industrialization of typography would possibly imply, with few actual concepts of how these questions is likely to be answered. Will typography stay on the web page or will it reap the benefits of advances in radio to be each textual content and sound? Might we develop a common typeface that’s relevant to any and all contexts? In the long run, these experiments amounted to little and the questions had been closed, and the actual advances had been within the effectivity of each manufacturing and the design course of. Monotype is likely to be reopening these previous questions, however it’s nonetheless reasonable about AI within the close to future.
“Our chief focus is connecting individuals to the kind that they want — all over the place,” says Charles Nix, senior govt inventive director at Monotype, and one in all Re:Imaginative and prescient’s authors. That is nothing new for Monotype, which has been coaching its similarity engine to acknowledge typefaces since 2015.
However the broader potentialities, Nix says, are limitless, and that’s what makes being a typographer now so thrilling. “I feel that at both finish of the parentheses of AI are human beings who’re in search of novel options to issues to make use of their abilities as designers,” he says. “You don’t get these alternatives many instances in the middle of one’s life, to see a radical shift in the best way expertise performs inside not solely your business, however a whole lot of industries.”
Not everyone seems to be offered. For Zeynep Akay, inventive director at typeface design studio Dalton Maag, the outcomes merely aren’t there to justify getting too excited. That’s to not say Dalton Maag rejects AI; the assistive potential of AI is critical. Dalton Maag is exploring utilizing AI to mitigate the repetitive duties of sort design that decelerate creativity, like constructing kern tables, writing OpenType options, and diagnosing font points. However many designers stay tempered in regards to the prospect of relinquishing inventive management to generative AI.
“It’s virtually as if we’re being gaslighted into believing our lives, or our professions, or our inventive abilities are ephemeral,” Akay says. She is but to see how its generative functions promise a greater inventive future. “It’s a future by which, arguably, all human mental endeavor is shed over time, and handed over to AI — and what we achieve in return isn’t altogether clear,” she provides.
For his half, Nix agrees: the extra reasonable and realizable use of AI is the streamlining of what he calls the “actually pedantic” work of typography. AI would possibly flatten the barrier to entry in design and typography, he says, however “inventive considering, that state of being a inventive being, that’s nonetheless there no matter what we do with the mechanism.”
“Thirty-five years in the past there was an identical type of thought that introducing computing to design would find yourself changing designers,” he continues. “However for all of us who’ve spent the final 35 years creating design utilizing computer systems, it has not diminished our creativity in any respect.”
“For all of us who’ve spent the final 35 years creating design utilizing computer systems, it has not diminished our creativity in any respect.”
That shift to digital sort was the results of a transparent and discernible want to enhance typographic workflow from setting sort by hand to one thing extra speedy, Akay says. Within the present house, nonetheless, we’ve arrived on the paintbrush earlier than realizing how the canvas seems. As highly effective as AI might be, the place in our workflow it needs to be deployed is but to be understood — if it needs to be deployed in any respect, given the less-than-stellar outcomes we’re seeing within the broader spectrum of generative AI. That lack of path makes her wonder if a greater analog isn’t the dot-com bubble of the late Nineties.
In some ways, it mirrors our present scenario with AI. As public entry to the web elevated, a wave of dot-com startups emerged and with them elevated enterprise capital, although the web on the time “by no means linked to a sensible shopper want,” Akay says. Overvalued and with out a drawback to unravel or a significant connection to customers, lots of these startups crashed in 2000. “However [the internet] got here again at a time when there have been precise issues to unravel,” she provides.
Equally, few customers exploring AI are skilled designers making an attempt to optimize workflow; slightly, AI is more and more the playground — and product — of executives overvaluing AI as they try and automate jobs and attempt to push creativity out of inventive professions.
Each Nix and Akay agree an identical crash round AI would possibly really be helpful in pushing a few of these enterprise capitalist pursuits out of AI. For Nix, nonetheless, simply because its sensible want isn’t instantly apparent doesn’t imply it’s not there or, a minimum of, received’t turn into obvious quickly. Nix means that it could be past the bounds of our present sight view.
Nix provides that in our Western-focused view of AI, we’d not see the distinction in our expansive number of typefaces and the way restricted these selections is likely to be for non-Latin scripts, for example. That, and comparable areas exterior the Western mainstream of design, could also be the place the necessity for change is extra obvious. “The periphery might find yourself driving the need-state [for AI].”
For all that, it stays unlikely that present fashions of promoting typography will change, nonetheless. We’d nonetheless be licensing fonts from firms like Monotype and Dalton Maag. However on this AI-driven course of, these generative apps could be folded into current typography subscriptions and licensing prices handed on to us via cost of these subscription charges.
Although, that is still extra hypothesis. We’re just so early on this that the one AI instruments we will really show are font identification instruments like WhatTheFont and associated concepts like TypeMixer.xyz. It’s not attainable to precisely comprehend what such nascent expertise will do primarily based solely on what it does now — it’s like making an attempt to know a four-dimensional form. “What was outlined as sort in 1965 is radically completely different from what we outline as sort in 2025,” Nix provides. “We’re primed to know that these issues are attainable to alter, and that they’ll change. But it surely’s exhausting at this stage to type of see how a lot of our present workflows we protect, how a lot of our present understanding and definition of typography we protect.”However as we discover, it’s essential to not get caught up with the spectacle of what it seems like AI can do. It could appear romantic to those that have already dedicated to AI in any respect prices, however Akay suggests this isn’t nearly mechanics, that creativity is effective “as a result of it isn’t straightforward or quick, however slightly as a result of it’s historically the results of work, consideration, and threat.” We can not put the toothpaste again within the tube, however, she provides, in an unsure future and workflow, “that doesn’t imply that it’s constructed on agency, neutral foundations, nor does it imply we’ve got to be reckless within the current.”
