Hi! This is David Kim in MyType Team!
https://mytype.io/ is a font market platform for designers to search fonts much easier. We are utilizing artificial intelligence technology to classify fonts and provide a user experience that is easier and faster to find fonts.
I want to ask you if the service we are creating is going to be useful, so I’m writing here.
Let me introduce our service. There will be many images.
Both designers who use fonts and designers who create fonts have big problems.
- Font users enter multiple font sites to find their own feelings. And they look up using various font categories and knowledge, but the results with the fonts are sorted regardless of each other so that they have to gaze one by one.
- Because of poor search engines based on tags, making their fonts stand out is a big problem for font creators. This feature forces font creators to put information that is definitely not related to fonts (even Sans Serif and Serif are included together…) And receive chicken feed.
We have created a style-based search platform to solve these problems! This is a way to solve problems for both font users and font creators!
This picture is the first page of our
landing page. First, there are five buttons that let you use our service simply.
When you click on the font, the buttons change to the fonts that are similar
with the font you choose. If you're interested, you can check out our service
by clicking Try Full Version.
Then you will see this screen. You can choose category, Slant and Weight just like existing font search platform. If you do not know what you want, you can just click the Search button to see it all!
I want to see Display and Handwriting here, I have selected two and set the Weight as above. Then press the Search button.
Voila! Many fonts are coming! It's not just search results, but similar styles, so it's much easier to find! I like the League Script, but do not like it a bit. So what should I do?
Click the arrow next to the font card to open a new window. Let 's start with the first Focus this Style.
New results are loading! I can see a lot of letters similar to League Script. I like Miss Fajardose here!
By the way, I think that handwriting is too complicated. But I want the style like League Script. Then click Similar Style at. And I want Sans Serif, so let's click on Sans.
Results are at the top that are Sans Serif and as thin as League Script! With MyType, it will be really easy to find fonts!
This system does not sort with the most recent fonts, the most used fonts or alphabetically, but purely the design of fonts.
This system recommends exactly what the user wants, so the fonts are not buried by other fonts and are hardly not exposed! So when they uploading fonts, there is no reason to worry about strange tags or marketing strategies. Only the font design will be considered! Mytype do not even get the commission as much as other font sites.
Our service is in mytype.io and anyone can check it. In addition, we are currently recruiting font creators. If you submit free fonts for beta launching, the fonts are able to get exposure to search results!
Bug reports and feedback are always welcome. We hope this service will help you to find some fonts.
David.
Comments
First of all, we use 1266 fonts in Google Fonts. I think the reason why there are different styles mixed together is the lack of dataset. Our artificial intelligence loses its way when there is no font similar to the font you choose. It probably thinks that font is similar, but we human don't.
Let me explain the algorithm of selection and sorting. we create an AI system by following the neural network of the eyes so that looks at the style of the fonts and selects similar things. It sounds a bit strange, but it's possible these days.
We are trying to improve what you said. Anyway, thank you for your feedback!
Basically, we use our eyes when choosing fonts. So we mimic them in algorithm! that's all about AI stuff.
Our AI system can see and recommend fonts similar to the font you choose. So, you don't need to gaze all of the fonts one by one. I think it is better search engine for designers. But, we have to improve it more accurate. Thank you for your feedback!
From trying to identify fonts with my own eyes, I can more easily identify a font by looking at its heavier weights that its lighter weights. I think trying identify a typeface by looking at ultra-lights is like trying to identify a person while wearing X-Ray glasses. If you were to manually define each typeface's "index weight" and use that for identification.
MyType Team
The team at MyType is a group of people
who have gathered to create a smart and efficient font marketplace.
We have recently incorporated our business
and are set to launch the beta service in March.
MyType seeks to provide the most efficient marketplace
for both font creators and font buyers.
We always work to be your perfect business partner.
If you are looking to get designers involved I for one would like who you are, where you are, where my font data is stored, where the payments are coming from; just off the top of my head.
You can receive over 80% of the sale proceeds
Through MyType’s effective systems, including the Sales Boosting System and Font Navigation, we make it possible to return more than 80% of sales proceeds to font creators. You deserve to enjoy more with MyType.
Just to give a few examples, ‘Art Nouveau’ or ‘British’ would not be categories which could be easily defined by appearance alone. Nor could these categories be defined simply in terms of when, where, and by whom they were made. Gill Sans screams ‘British’ in a way that ‘Baskerville’ doesn’t.
Eurostile was designed in the 50's, but is more closely associated with Science Fiction than with 50s period work due to its appearance in film and television.
I doubt very much that Koch had dinosaurs in mind when he designed Neuland, but that’s probably one of the first things that comes to mind when people see it today. And the appearance of the font certainly won’t provide that information.
Schneidler’s Légende was loosely based on French civilités, but is often associated with Arabia due to its (mis)use on book jackets and movie posters.
The list goes on...
[Edit -- I appear to have misspelled ‘Microgramma’ when I said Eurostile was from the 50s]
Actually, I am not using datasets made by human. We are using convolutional neural network which is pretrained by ImageNet (yeah, it is made by human, but the feature vector through the network is not correlated to the categories) and some techniques. That is, our AI is not using any data of category or weight etc, but visual features like human. However, we have recently felt the need to create data like Apple or Spotify like you said, so we decided to do. Thank you for your feedback!
Without actual classification data (meta tags) applied by humans to datasets, labelling them with the correct tags, your idea is a task designed to fail.
- physical charactertistics
- well known typeface names
- theme
- intended use
It should be easy to determine which results are more valid by watching the customer's behavior. One customer searches for narrow cowboy slab and clicks on results that correspond. Another customer searches for wide cowboy curly and does the same. The AI gradually learns what a cowboy typeface is or at least which results it should show if someone enters that term. Machine learning is good at that sort of thing.A big downside of this is all the customers at the beginning will be getting inaccurate results as the system learns. And what if the customer enters the name of a famous typeface that's not on the system? If the user enters Century Schoolbook and the site doesn't have it, how is it going to come up with Mark Simonson's Grad? If you search on MyFonts for the same term, Grad shows up because Schoolbook is in the ad copy and tags. Ad copy and tags are flawed but in the end, the results are going to be more useful, at least in the short term. I think the best font site search results would be weighted results based on a combination of tags, ad copy and visual with machine learning applied to it.
A system that is designed to show fonts by 'similarity' is like saying that the question is blue, and somewhere among a few shades of blue is the blue answer. There is no value in this.
Typefaces are much more than stylised letterforms. A platform that functions solely on letterform similarity will deliver results at the expense of many other aspects that are important in selecting a typeface; family, quality, spacing, punctuation, originality, language support, glyph set ...the list is long. I put a huge amount of time into these aspects of typefaces that you are proposing to filter out.
In answer to your question 'is the service we are creating going to be useful?', my answer is no. This market platform is built on the premise that designers should spend less time selecting typefaces, and appears to me to be detrimental to the craft, experience and professionalism of this community.
We know that users feel overwhelmed but the choices of fonts. We know users like to see fonts in lists. I think user data will prove that the real purpose of this kind of service is to provide a way for users to to find lists of fonts that feel a little bit easier to digest. I say "feel" because it might be a complete fiction - what really matters is the psychological result.
So I'd suggest this alternate question: What kind of service provide users with a way to slay the tyranny of choice and have the illusion of control over the list?
There's a chance that fontsinuse search data and user behavior data can already tell us something about my hypothesis. @Florian Hardwig? @Stephen Coles? @Nick Sherman? Google might also have some hints, @Dave Crossland? I'd also ask Mary Catherine but I don't think she's a member?
The curation of the foundries included in such a guide has other important functions, including introducing the public to typefaces from independent creators beyond what is available on the most popular platforms (chiefly: MyFonts, Adobe Fonts, Google Fonts). The usefulness of MyType.io’s particular approach is certainly debatable, but I think there is a lot of value in discovery platforms that include a significant plurality of underexposed foundries.
@JoyceKetterer is absolutely right. There is a huge need for typeface guides of all sorts. Fonts In Use plays some of that role. We haven’t studied the data, but I’ve seen plenty of anecdotal evidence that designers use our platform to find new typefaces and inform their selection.
We’re drifting away from the topic at hand. I just want to reinforce the notion that guides like MyType.io can be very good for indie producers like Miles, even if they focus on a single aspect of type selection.
As a professional type user, I long for a place where I can find the best option from a pre-defined field. I often already know my question is blue (e.g. “dynamic sans serif with an edge”). I need to filter down to the option that comes with small caps, Cyrillics, and an App license. Also, I might be unaware of many available shades of blue, especially the more recent ones that are scattered across various small platforms.
As a foundry, I’d indeed be skeptical about services that only give me more shades of blue, without additional info or filters. It all comes down to curation. Quality is harder to assess than surface appearance (via AI) and … price. Which sources are included? It’s kind of telling that the start set here is Google Fonts. I’d be afraid to end up with a platform that presents my products next to superficially similar but heavily discounted me-too releases, “closest matches already included in your Adobe CC subscription”, and “free alternatives on Google Fonts”, but fails to spotlight any of their qualities.