Announcing the first Fonts and AI conference

Nadine Chahine

Dear all,
We are thrilled to share this news with you! We are hosting the first fully dedicated type conference to the topic of how AI can change the landscape of type design. From threats to opportunities to cross industry collaboration, this will be fun! 

We also recognise that indie foundries often do not have the resources to delve into this topic on their own so we are looking to encourage and foster conversations.

The conference will take place online on Oct 23 and 24 and the program is being curated by:

Petr van Blokland
Nadine Chahine
Dave Crossland
Simon Daniels
John Hudson
Alice Savoie

Check our website and follow our accounts to keep up to date with the latest announcements! https://trust.ilovetypography.com/fonts-and-ai/

Nick Shinn

Yes, the Race to Oblivion will be great fun.

Nadine Chahine

There's a lot that we need to learn about this technology, what it is and it is not. There are many threats but there are also opportunities so we can either bury our heads in the sand or we try to understand what we are facing.

The idea of this conference came up during one of the panels at the Font Business conference we organised. It seemed prudent to offer a space for people to learn about the technology (what it really is, not the hype) and to discuss what it means. If there are genuine opportunities, then we hope that people come together to collaborate.

A personal note here: I'm quite concerned about the environmental impact of AI, and the disruption it will likely bring to society at large. But this is not reason to disengage from the topic. I would like to get a better sense of the technology and where we are and who is doing interesting work on this. 

Education on this topic is crucial, and this is the approach we take for this conference.

Laura Meseguer

Looking forward to know more about it! 

Thomas Phinney

What is the deadline for talk proposals? The website does not seem to currently address that.

adamwhite

People still don't use manual potential enough in typography world, so AI will for sure not help much. Tools are not the problem, but ignorance keeping designers from using it and solving existing problems.

You don't need AI to analyse that text rendering engines and layouts are a mess, that text is still understood as preparing lead characters on the printing machine from the last century, that one phoneme should be equal to one grapheme and that phoneme pairs should be attached to unicode pairs.

All of these nonsense comes from inheriting typography tradition without evolving, and relying on tech companies to dictate processes instead of vice versa. 

Nadine Chahine

Thomas Phinney said:

What is the deadline for talk proposals? The website does not seem to currently address that.

September 5 please. I've updated the info on the website to include the date.