Creative Fabrica - AI Font Generator

Yury Yarmola

Filip Paldia said:

When I simplify, the future is more likely to favour Bezier curves than bitmaps. 

I don't think describing outlines with Bézier curves is the right solution. It’s quite difficult to train a model in this way on the relatively small dataset available to us and expect good results without complex post-processing (which would distort the generated output). I believe better results can be achieved by using more sophisticated and more structured methods of describing glyph shapes.

Yury Yarmola

Dave Crossland said:

Laws change. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/mar/31/designers-uk-copyright-law-ai-letter

Even if someone passes a law regulating AI training, it would be local and temporary. You can't really expect to stop the tide with legislation.

Dave Crossland

Alex Visi said:

Dave Crossland said:

Maybe I went to far before, saying that even the Unicode text strings of the document file themselves can be discarded everywhere soon enough, but they are discarded in video data files' on screen text already since forever...

I can imagine a drawn pdf, but for any dynamic text, such as on the web? How would search and the basic text operations work? How would it get a consistent typeface across all the branded materials? How would it go beyond generating mediocre typefaces? 

Now I'm on a laptop not a phone I can easily find the previous thread I was thinking of.

There I said the same as Yuri - for any dynamic text, such as on the web, a web page that is just a single big JPEG used to be a big problem (copy and paste didn't work, translation didn't work, search engine indexing didn't work, screen readers didn't work, etc) - but today the same A.I. technology is now very good at "computer vision" and can do all basic text operations work on such an image of a text document, by recreating Unicode strings from such images on the fly, and can even replace their regions on the image with translated texts in similar type styles.

If that sounds like more expensive computation, sure it is, but... That never stopped any of us before - even just posting on this forum is more computation than when the type community discussion was on Usenet comp.fonts. Computation of everything is always going up. I often look with much wonder at the 1970s Smalltalk desktop/network systems that faced - and addressed - most of the problems that do exist with personal computing, and arguably addressed them better than what we have 50 years later today. I mean it's kinda laughable, really, how much more powerful our hardware is after 50 years, and how less powerful our software is in comparison.... In a way, the current jump in functionality of A.I. is putting us back up on the trend line that was sagging. Anyway.

Generative A.I. systems can produce consistent typefaces and other branded materials across surfaces/sessions using a simple seed handle or hash id; these systems are an enormous mountain of data, and each prompt is rolling a little ping pong ball down, and the path it takes through the terrain can be massively compressed into a very dense ID of essentially the key turning/bouncing points. It's effectively a compression scheme, where a very large database is preloaded generically, and then each typeface's unique font ID data is a very small piece to transfer. This is all already in use for consistently recognizable human faces/appearances.

Regarding quality, Pablo Impallari already demonstrated here on this forum these systems can go beyond generating "blurry averaged" typefaces to produce "original" ones, and any mediocrity will fade away over time as more data is added and reinforcement learning recurses.

Yuri, when I saw 'laws change,' I mean the UK law has proposed to make it clear that legal challenges to this happening won't be allowed there, not to make them easier. The tide is going out inexorably.

Filip Paldia

Yury Yarmola said:

Filip Paldia said:

When I simplify, the future is more likely to favour Bezier curves than bitmaps. 

I don't think describing outlines with Bézier curves is the right solution. It’s quite difficult to train a model in this way on the relatively small dataset available to us and expect good results without complex post-processing (which would distort the generated output). I believe better results can be achieved by using more sophisticated and more structured methods of describing glyph shapes.

Intuitively, I would agree that outlines only encoding in a sequential way is not enough. But, disagree that encoding outlines (bezier drawing data) in other ways e.g. graph representations, or combining with multimodal e.g. sequences and maybe outline auxiliary points for CNNs, or distance fields would not be sufficient.

My experiment showed that for the dataset, it is enough to have up to a few dozen normalised pieces per topological style. I also trained only on outline sequences, not using any additional representation, which would improve the results greatly.

The only problem I suspect is the style transfer limitation. However, augmentation of the dataset to bring some noise might help. (Haven't tested it yet.)

Again, I must stress that the training was really cheap compared to training on images.

Stuart Sandler

This is analogous to how AI may look at a photo of a cake to figure out how to make a cake vs a recipe.

Dave Crossland

I don't quite understand what you mean Stuart, could you explain in more detail?

Stuart Sandler

@Dave Crossland try looking at photos of an airplane and build one that actually flies with only this information.

That's what I'm getting at . . . AI can only generates an output to your query but it fundamentally isn't starting from any meaningful place of understanding of all the mechanical or aeronautical engineering from the ground up to come to its conclusion.

AI is only attempting to answer your question from the data it actually is working with . . . Images of airplanes.

So while AI is attempting to generate a set of harmonious letterforms to output images of set words in a particular style, it's not really coming at font design from the same perspective or with the same considerations as a font designer would.

I'm sincerely not making the case for humans here but rather as my initial comment stated, imagine trying to create a cake only from photos of a baked and frosted finished cake vs understanding baking, following a recipe, tasting the result.

PabloImpallari

Stuart Sandler said:

So while AI is attempting to generate a set of harmonious letterforms to output images of set words in a particular style, it's not really coming at font design from the same perspective or with the same considerations as a font designer would.

It's bit more complex than that.. since the training process not only uses "training" images, but "normalization" images as well.

To put it in very simple words, "Training" images are images of what you want, and "normalization" images of what you don't want.. this way you will show both examples of good and bad type, so you can provide some sort of human teaching style guidance to the AI learning process.

The real burden is to get both sets of "training" and "normalization" images right, so the AI results can be good as one of your human students.

To summarize, you need to provide examples of not only good typography, but also bad typography, so that the AI ​​can understand the difference between the two. (And this "good/bad examples combo" can be done on a very general level, or very specifically for each particular concept you want to teach the AI).

James Puckett

Does that mean that we can poison the AI by flooding the internet with broken fonts and garbage specimens? Russia and China are already doing that with disinformation. So it seems like we could dump crap on Reddit and social media to make ChatGPT think that Arial automatically spaced with Fontlab is the ultimate example of the craft.

PabloImpallari

Yes, if you have 2 robots, you can train one to be Mahatma Ggandhi and the other one to be the terminator, it all depend of the training material you use to train each one.

Stuart Sandler

@PabloImpallari indeed you're correct on all accounts there, I was being somewhat loose with my explanation but my comment was more specific to the unique initial POV or starting approach of AI vs a human font designer even if both end up with a similar result in the end of ends which is a grouping of letterforms.

Simon Cozens

James Puckett said:

Does that mean that we can poison the AI by flooding the internet with broken fonts and garbage specimens?

DeepVecFont is trained on 1001freefonts.com, so there is a case to be made that this is already happening.