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Ritupriya BasuWhat is The Future Of Type? Together with Brandpad, we ask top type designers for their hot takes
Welcome to The Future Of, a series presented in collaboration with digital brand guidelines platform Brandpad. Over the course of six articles, we’ll speak to the brightest designers, studios and agencies about the future of graphic design, unspooling the ideas that will shape tomorrow. For our debut story, we look at The Future Of Type. We’re curious – how will typefaces be created in the future? What kind of a role will emerging technologies play in how we make, use and experience type? Will the future be just as inclusive as experimental? We took our burning questions to some leading designers, foundries and thought leaders in the world of type.
In a scene in the 2007 documentary Helvetica, design critic Rick Poynor says, “Type is saying things to us all the time.” More than a decade since, his words still ring with a universal truth. To anyone looking closely, type tells us many things – about the ideas that hold our attention at a moment in time, the tools at our disposal, and the way we decide to use them. From the time it was etched on stones and palm leaves, to now, when it dances on our screens, the mediums through which type has been constructed have changed drastically, and today, the industry stands at the precipice of new emerging technologies.
In spite of all the turning wheels, the craft of type design has remained as meticulous as ever. “It’s a truly painstaking, time-consuming, attention-to-detail, for-the-love-of-it art form,” Otherwhere Collective’s Creative Director Andrew Bellamy tells us. Designer, typographer and educator Beatriz Lozano agrees. “At its core, I believe the process of creating a typeface hasn’t changed much in the past decades. You have to start with a solid concept, iterate endlessly, build your system, and refine your characters for all eternity or until you start to feel the early onset symptoms of carpal tunnel,” she says.
While the conceptual process is as demanding as ever, the emergence of machine learning promises to liberate the designer from the manual, repetitive tasks of type design, such as “kerning, expanding character sets and quality control,” explains David Brezina, Managing Director at Rosetta Type Foundry. Providing more control over the process and essentially letting designers work more swiftly, these new technologies will be somewhat like “the leap between MS Paint and Photoshop,” says Pangram Pangram’s Founder Mathieu Desjardins. But as the tech develops, is it too wild to imagine a future where software – working with the restraints and parameters a designer sets for it – starts creating typefaces from scratch? “Making typefaces can be a fairly mechanical process. In creating a rational font, designers establish parameters that are strictly adhered to in order to create a consistent design. A systematic exercise that could potentially be automated,” notes Bellamy.
It will be easy for an AI software to create thousands of versions of Helvetica.
“It’s not too hard to imagine a dedicated type generation software where you can input these parameters and have it render a font incredibly quickly. Or a new menu in Illustrator that replaces the font menu with an AI font generation menu, where instead of selecting a font you input certain parameters and it makes a font for you.” Bellamy points out that although type design felt fairly untouched by the advancements in AI for a while, now, GPT-4o – launched just five months after Midjourney’s v.6 update, which can produce readable words in any style – demonstrates significant advancements in text generation.
“Notably, it showcases the ability to generate extensive multi-line texts in images maintaining a consistent font throughout, and offers glimpses of some ‘text to font’ examples,” he notes. “Despite the remarkable cohesion observed in these examples, at the time of this interview, we’re not able to test it out, and it looks like there’s still a lack of the huge degree of control needed for type design.” This need for control, and hence, the role designers play in finessing the output is key, according to Desjardins. “These tools will certainly help, but they won’t replace the human input in the final result. It will be easy, at some point, for an AI software to create thousands of versions of Helvetica, but it will fail miserably at creating a unique, subtle typeface such as our recent PP Playground.”
How much of the ‘creative’ work we do is actually creative?
While the possibility of software generating entire typefaces is still up for debate, the idea seems far-fetched to Brezina. Besides, as he points out, such a scenario – as in most cases with machine learning – raises ethical questions. “These tools need to be based on large data sets, often copyrighted,” he says. “Type designers with their licenses have been keeping their cards close to their chests,” adds Brezina, which may have an impact on the way tech progresses. “The way AI uses copyrighted content is not something that should be glossed over.”
Beyond the man vs machine debate, it’s interesting to note how the emergence of these technologies is serving as a wake-up call for designers to question formulaic design. As Bellamy puts it, “AI is provoking reflection – how much of the ‘creative’ work we do is actually creative?” The design process has always begun with questions. “We constantly question – what are we doing that no other brand can do, what no other studio can do, how are we moving things forward, how are we being disruptive?” he says. “So if we add the question, “What are we doing that a machine can’t do?” it moves us to think of less logical, rational and formulaic responses, which in turn makes us move from thinking to feeling; more human problem solving and creativity.”
What are we doing that a machine can’t do?
The breadth of creative expression that these tools can provide seems poised to push designers to be even more experimental in their approach, elevating the innate ‘humane-ness’ of creativity. “As our relationship with the digital world evolves, we will keep finding new ways to signal a human mind behind the designs,” adds Brezina. This push to more left-field thinking will make more space for unconventional ideas, provoking creatives to get a bit weird and less predictable with their ideas and executions. “In general, designers and brands will be much more comfortable with having a sense of humour, being a bit eccentric, flamboyant, or even odd,” predicts Bellamy. It’s a sentiment that Desjardins agrees with. “Ultimately, in a world where everything seems or feels like a copy of a copy of something you’ve already seen, uniqueness will be key.”
Pushing the world of type into daring new directions is not something type designers will have to do alone. As AR and VR technologies sharpen gradually and we find ourselves in the era of spatial typography – which presents new dimensions to consider – the collision between the world of design and technology will “open up exciting channels for collaboration between type designers, typographers, coders, 3D designers, and motion designers, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible when it comes to type design in immersive experiences,” Bellamy tells us.
While collaboration makes space for creative solutions we’ve never experienced before, could these radical new technologies also ensure that the future of type design is just as inclusive as its experimental? Could it help navigate the challenges around limited language support for typefaces and ensure that everyone, irrespective of language borders, shares in this future? “I am very interested in seeing how we can implement AI to extend character sets to create inclusive typefaces other than Latin,” says Lozano. “I am hopeful that emerging tech can help designers who are native readers – of, for example, traditional Chinese which has over 50,000 characters – to design typefaces with their full character sets in a multitude of styles and expressions.” However, this shift will depend just as much on technology as it will on the decisions being made by type designers. “Hopefully, we will see more designers from the Global South designing for their specific visual environment as their economies grow,” says Brezina. “Some of the important actions designers in the Global West can take are knowledge sharing, focusing on quality, and being mindful of diverse visual cultures.”
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