Critique Request for Gothic Gumdrop (100% AI-generated submission to Google Fonts)

ericlu
ericlu Posts: 1
in Type Design Critiques
Hi Everyone,

The Google Fonts contributor guidelines pointed me to this forum as a safe place to get feedback on my type designs. I was hoping to get feedback on a recent font I created called Gothic Gumdrop. 

This project emerged out of an effort to combine unique and unrelated type styles. I noticed that in the Google Fonts collection there were a lot of cute fonts, some bubbly fonts, and many blackletter fonts, but there wasn’t any options that combined all three of those styles. After rounds of exploration this font emerged, which tries to be cute and bubbly but blackletter at the same time. One of the most difficult aspects was to preserve the blackletter styles while making it chunkier. I think the end result feels more blackletter than cute, but it was hard to preserve both. 

Another unique aspect of this submission is that this font is 100% generated with AI. I created it using the Mixfont font generation model. This also helped me ensure that the glyph coverage supports the 320+ glyphs required for the Google Fonts Latin core set. 

I would love your feedback on the font overall, style direction, and whether there are areas that could be improved. I also would love to hear any thoughts on the usage of AI and if that is OK for a Google Fonts submission.  I wanted to be transparent about it.

Thank you,
Eric







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Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,679
    edited 2:26AM
    First off: great typeface name.

    The link to the GitHub repo is broken, so I can only respond to the images you posted here. The last of these suggests there may be problems with the vertical alignment of the diacritic characters, but I am not sure how the image was created.

    I think the project demonstrates that the notion of a cute, blobby blackletter is a viable design idea, and this is the sort of thing that AI can quickly establish. What AI isn’t good at is the detail work that goes into refining that idea perceptually, glyph-by-glyph and, especially, making optical corrections to balance the proportions, weight and texture between forms with differing spatial frequency.

    ‘Blobby’ is a challenging category in letter design, because you need to apply blobbiness as a quality to structure, while avoiding the structure itself becoming blobby. There are some places in this design where artifacts from blackletter ductus produce unnecessarily complex structures such as the hook of the y, and the top of the 5 and 7, which look awkward and unnatural when the blobbiness is applied.

    I am not sure how you want to proceed with this project. If you are committed in some way to the experiment of having the font 100% generated with AI, then I think you will fairly soon hit the inherent limitations of the current state of AI tools with regard to refinement and stability or, to put it another way, maintaining what is good while trying to get the machine to understand what is not good. If you are interested in taking this AI output as the basis of something that you would manually refine in a font editing tool, I think you will get more useful glyph-by-glyph feedback here.

    [I hope this is, indeed, a ‘a safe place to get feedback’ for you. There are indeed generous folk on this forum who help novice type designers with advice and critiques, but to my knowledge no one had previously shown up with a project that has been completely generated by AI. As you may have noticed, not everyone is a fan of AI, or even thinks it is morally defensible as a technology. I hope everyone manages to be kind.]

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