Font licensing is about to change

May 20th, 2026 might mark a turning point for the typography world. Today our team at Mixfont is launching our state of the art AI font generation model, and the results are good enough to be used in real-world applications.

I wanted to write this post to share about the capabilities and limitations of the current model, reflect on our progress, and to start a discussion about where we go from here. Our mission is to make the creation and sharing of fonts into the hands of everyone, but along the way we want to be thoughtful about the technology and how it can affect the existing industry. I will also dive into how font licensing works today, and how things might change as more and more people can access AI font generation tools like Mixfont.

How Font Licensing Works Today

Font licensing has traditionally been a very obtuse and complex process controlled by a few large players. And by a few large players, I mean basically one player: Monotype - the company behind MyFonts, Hoefler & Co, and a huge portion of the font catalog that most people use every day. If you look at how much fonts cost to license, you might find fonts like Bubble Bobble that starts at 29 USD for a single desktop license, but can easily cost thousands of dollars depending on the use case and scale.

Not only can fonts be expensive, but the terms of their usage can also be complicated as well. They might only be permitted to be used by a certain number of users, or page views, or in certain restricted environments.

Some modern initiaives, like Google Fonts, have made this more accessible and clear under the SIL Open Font License. But a free offering makes it difficult for contributers to make a living, and the result is a limited catalog of fonts that are often overused and aren't quite as unique as other commercial offerings.

What is Mixfont and how does it work?

Mixfont is an AI font generator. With a simple prompt or an image of some text, anyone can now create a unique, custom font that is fully usable and downloadable as a TTF file. Our team has trained a state of the art font generation model on a wide variety of images from across the internet - not just fonts. This allows the model to freely create fonts in a large variety of styles, from clean sans serifs to decorative, experimental display fonts. Then, we've created a pipeline to allow anyone to use this to create a complete font file. The full process takes just a few miiutes.

Up till now, font generation with AI has mostly been experimental. Type designers have used image generation services like Midjourey and Recraft to play with type ideas, but there was no systematic way to create a full font file from a text prompt or image. There have been recent research efforts like VecFusion that also approached this problem, but the results were not quite ready for real-world use. With Mixfont, we have focused on creating a model that can create high quality, usable fonts that can be deployed in real-world applications. We have also made it easy for anyone to use, with a simple web interface.

Here are some results from our model, with the prompts that were used to generate them:

Create a bubble-letter sticker font with inflated forms, squeezed counters, rounded joins, and a glossy playful feel for packaging or merch.

A “forgotten Geocities homepage” font made of blinking GIFs, broken image icons, rainbow dividers, tiny dancing babies, and cursed 1999 web nostalgia.

A high-contrast serif of romantic elegance and dramatic refinement

A clear, rounded font face with modern sans serif design and a friendly approachable design.

A font where each letter is made of up dinosaur parts, like long necks, teeth, claws, and tails.

The model can also be used to create fonts from images. For example, here's a font that was created from the Google logo:

The Google logo image was the inspiration for this font created with AI.

This font was created from the input image of the Coca-Cola logo.

As you can see from the embedded TTFs above, the results aren't quite as good as a bespoke font created by a professional type designer, but the tradeoff is that the model can be used to create a wide variety of fonts in a matter of minutes, and at a fraction of the cost.

While the model is still not perfect, we believe this is the first publicly available tool that can directly create high quality, embeddable fonts in any number of styles. If you'd like to try the service for yourself, you can visit Mixfont or learn more about our AI font generator.

Limitations

Mixfont is a powerful tool, but it still has it's own limitations. Baselining each letter is difficult, as well as perfecting kerning and spacing between letters. The model can also struggle with creating letters with completely consistent widths across all letters and symbols. Finally, generation times can still be in the 3-4 minute range, which can result in long processing for some users. Our team is aware and actively working on improving these limitations.

What does this mean for font licensing?

Fonts created on Mixfont are created uniquely and every generation is different. Our model is raster based, but doesn't trace or copy any aspects of input images. The model can generate fonts without any input TTF files or direct reference to any specific font. This means that fonts created on Mixfont are not derivative works of any existing fonts, and are instead new, original creations.

We designed font licensing on Mixfont to be as simple and open as possible. Every font created on Mixfont belongs to it's creator. Our approach is to offer personal-use licensing to all users, and commercial-use licensing to any paid plans. We wrote some more specific details about our license here.

Our team strongly believes that font creation and licensing should no longer be controlled in the hands of a few powerful players. Instead, creating a beautiful font should be easy, accesssible, democratized, and free from legal retribution.

We would love to work with existing type designers and foundries to find ways to use AI font generation to augment their work and make it easier for them to create and share their fonts. We also want to work with the broader design community to find ways to use AI font generation in a way that is ethical, responsible, and beneficial for everyone.

Open to feedback from designers and developers

We'd love to hear from designers and developers in the community on how AI font generation can be used in a way that benefits everyone. We realize that this is a nuanced conversation and our approach is to launch technology with respect and thoughtfulness. Our hope is that this is just the beginning of a new approach in the font licensing industry - one that has been stuck in time for hundreds of years.

Thanks for reading.