Why AI won't replace human type designers

Over the last few weeks while training the model beind Mixfont's AI font generator, one question that I ask myself is, will this replace typography designers?

Even though I'm a believer and supporter of the power of AI, I think the answer is no.

Replacing human type designers is not the goal at Mixfont. Instead, our goal is to make font creation more accessible and increase the excitement, creativity, and speed around type design. When used with this goal in mind, AI shouldn't be a scary thing. It should be a powerful tool that can be useful when weilded by humans.

To help and assist, not replace

While much of our marketing material is centered around "AI font generation", the reality is that font creation is not a simple process that can be full automated. Typography has been one of humanity's oldest crafts, and today it remains a complex and nuanced aspect of design.

Our AI model can generate a font. But that's not the same as helping a designer create an everlasting brand. Or an agency to create a memorable campaign or logo. Those conversations are rooted in human emotions and identity, and require a lot more than a set of glyphs.

Our goal isn't to replace all of that, and I hope that AI won't ever replace all of that. Instead, we want Mixfont to be a tool that can be used for good.

How Mixfont can fit into existing (human) workflows

Designing from scratch has always been one of the hardest parts of the creative process. The iteration cycle of ideas to drafts to a workable version can be long, and then even at that point, there might be feedback that requires starting over from scratch.

The biggest use case for Mixfont is to help creatives and designers brainstorm ideas faster and iterate on concepts more quickly. Instead of spending hours or days sketching out ideas, a designer can use Mixfont to generate a variety of directions in minutes. They can be inspired by images found in the wild, and explore that direction quickly. They can create drafts and share them with clients to get feedback earlier in the process.

There is also a lot of repetitive work in type design. To qualify for submission of a Google Font, for example, the team requires full support of the GF Latin Core set, a collection of over 350 glyphs. Many of these, however, can be repetitive and formulaic - characters like à and á are often the same as a with a diacritic on top. AI can help automate much of that work, so that designers can focus on the creative and intentional parts of the process.

Our hope is that Mixfont can be a starting point that gets more integrated into a designers workflow. Real work can now be done faster, and designers are more free to spend time on the fun parts of design, and less time on the tedious aspects.

Humans design for humans

Typography does not have one correct answer. The right typeface depends on the audience, medium, brand, language, size, tone, and surrounding design system. Moreover, the perfect font is usually a result of a human's intention, wants, and needs. An AI model will never be able to truly understand your business' brand, story, and values the way a human can.

We don't think that this part of the process can be replaced. Truly understanding the full breadth of a projects requirements, communicating gracefully with clients, and iterating on subtle details until the result is perfect, is all part of a human process that happens outside of a GPU machine.

There are still fundamental limitations of AI-generated fonts

It's not a secret that the fonts that are generated on Mixfont are not perfect. There are many issues with spacing, kerning, baseline consistency, weight control, and production quality. We are working hard to improve all of those things, but even we don't believe AI could truly surpass the bespoke work of a master designer. The limitations are real and make it hard to imagine a future where AI can fully replace humans.

More people making fonts is a good thing

One of the reasons I am excited about Mixfont is that it lets more people participate in font creation. Most people have never made a font because the tools are intimidating, the process is slow, and the licensing world can feel opaque. AI lowers that barrier.

How many times have you heard someone say, "I wish I could turn my handwriting into a font"? or "Dang, I really like the font from that movie poster, I wish I could try using it". With Mixfont, we hope to grow the number of people who are even interested in typography and then on top of that, can play with it and even create their own.

This process doesn't replace professional type designers. If anything, it helps more people understand how deep the craft goes.

The future I hope for is not one where AI takes over and we're filled with slop fonts. The better future is one where more people can start, and more experts can help finish beautiful typography.

What WILL change

Of course, we won't pretend that nothing will change. We of course hope that things will change, but for the better. With AI, more typography could be created than ever before. For simple projects, there can be a much more simple and transparent licensing process. And more power will be put in the hands of everyone, not just an elite, powerful few.

We hope to partner with leading type designers so that we can launch this technology responsibly, and we hope to release this respectfully in a way that benefits the entire community.

At the end of the day, we want to empower more people to create and use fonts, and we want to help type designers do their best work faster. We don't want to replace anyone, and we hope that AI, even in this space, can be a powerful tool for good.

If you're interested in working together, please reach out!