Monotype is eager so that you can know what AI would possibly do in typography. As one of many largest kind design firms on the earth, Monotype owns Helvetica, Futura, and Gill Sans — amongst 250,000 different fonts. Within the typography large’s 2025 Re:Imaginative and prescient traits report, revealed in February, Monotype devotes a whole chapter to how AI will lead to a reactive typography that may “leverage emotional and psychological information” to tailor itself to the reader. It would convey textual content into focus if you take a look at it and soften when your gaze drifts. It might shift typefaces relying on the time of day and lightweight degree. It might even adapt to studying speeds and emphasize the necessary parts of on-line textual content for higher engagement. AI, the report suggests, will make kind accessible by “clever brokers and chatbots” and let anybody generate typography no matter coaching or design proficiency. How that will probably be deployed isn’t sure, presumably as a part of proprietarily educated apps. Certainly, how any of it will work stays nebulous.
Monotype isn’t alone in this sort of hypothesis. Typographers are preserving a detailed 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 area, creatives are becoming a member of the continuing gold rush to search out the use case of AI in kind design. This search continues each speculatively and, in some locations, adversarially as creatives push again in opposition to 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 have 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 artistic expertise 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 benefit from 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 have been closed, and the actual advances have 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 sensible about AI within the close to future.
“Our chief focus is connecting individuals to the sort that they want — in all places,” says Charles Nix, senior government artistic 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 believe that at both finish of the parentheses of AI are human beings who’re on the lookout for novel options to issues to make use of their expertise as designers,” he says. “You don’t get these alternatives many occasions in the middle of one’s life, to see a radical shift in the way in which expertise performs inside not solely your trade, however a number of industries.”
Not everyone seems to be bought. For Zeynep Akay, artistic 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 kind 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 artistic management to generative AI.
“It’s virtually as if we’re being gaslighted into believing our lives, or our professions, or our artistic expertise are ephemeral,” Akay says. She is but to see how its generative purposes promise a greater artistic future. “It’s a future through which, arguably, all human mental endeavor is shed over time, and handed over to AI — and what we acquire in return isn’t altogether clear,” she provides.
For his half, Nix agrees: the extra sensible 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 “artistic pondering, that state of being a artistic being, that’s nonetheless there no matter what we do with the mechanism.”
“Thirty-five years in the past there was the same 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 kind was the results of a transparent and discernible want to enhance typographic workflow from setting kind by hand to one thing extra fast, Akay says. Within the present area, nonetheless, we’ve arrived on the paintbrush earlier than understanding how the canvas seems. As highly effective as AI might be, the place in our workflow it must be deployed is but to be understood — if it must be deployed in any respect, given the less-than-stellar outcomes we’re seeing within the broader spectrum of generative AI. That lack of course makes her ponder whether a greater analog isn’t the dot-com bubble of the late Nineties.
In some ways, it mirrors our present state of affairs 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 client want,” Akay says. Overvalued and with out a downside to resolve or a significant connection to shoppers, a lot of these startups crashed in 2000. “However [the internet] got here again at a time when there have been precise issues to resolve,” she provides.
Equally, few shoppers exploring AI are skilled designers attempting to optimize workflow; fairly, AI is more and more the playground — and product — of executives overvaluing AI as they try to automate jobs and attempt to push creativity out of artistic professions.
Each Nix and Akay agree the same crash round AI would possibly really be useful 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, at the least, gained’t develop into obvious quickly. Nix means that it might be past the bounds of our present field of regard.
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 could 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 might be folded into present typography subscriptions and licensing prices handed on to us by fee of these subscription charges.
Although, that continues to be extra hypothesis. We’re in order that 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 doable to precisely comprehend what such nascent expertise will do primarily based solely on what it does now — it’s like attempting to know a four-dimensional form. “What was outlined as kind in 1965 is radically totally different from what we outline as kind in 2025,” Nix provides. “We’re primed to know that these issues are doable to vary, and that they are going to change. But it surely’s arduous 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 necessary to not get caught up with the spectacle of what it appears to be like like AI can do. It might 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 fairly as a result of it’s historically the results of work, consideration, and danger.” 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 to be reckless within the current.”
