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

ericlu
ericlu Posts: 13
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: 3,682
    edited June 16
    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.]
  • ericlu
    ericlu Posts: 13
    John, I really appreciate your detailed feedback. The linked repository was accidentally set to private before and now has been made public. I think your feedback about the consistent blobby-ness across the glyphset makes sense, and I'm going to try to improve it to incorporate those ideas. It was difficult to continue with the cute and blobby motif though in many cases while still preserving the clear blackletter ideas.

    I admit this is partially an exploration in pushing the limits of what's possible with AI font generation today. I think it will be an interesting milestone to see if a fully AI-generated font could potentially be submitted (and accepted) to Google fonts. The Mixfont model I used is quite capable. I would love to have a discussion about that as well, but it might be a better saved for another thread. 
  • ericlu
    ericlu Posts: 13
    Xiaoyuan said:
    I think we all should stop reply this thread, Eric, what you do is horrible.
    Xiaoyuan, I'm a real person trying my best to ethically explore AI use in font generation. I've sent you an email privately but I also want to share here publicly that I would truly love to have an open conversation with you (or anyone here) about how you feel, your concerns, and any thoughts you have on how things could change. I am trying to use AI ethically and in a way that can make typography more accessible.


  • jeremy tribby
    jeremy tribby Posts: 290
    ericlu said:
    I am trying to use AI ethically and in a way that can make typography more accessible.
    what do you mean by accessible? 
  • Igor Petrovic
    Igor Petrovic Posts: 366
    Is this legal?
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 52
    This might constitute a new low on TypeDrawers, at least in my memory.

    Xiaoyuan, thanks for pointing out what kind of a person is actually behind this claimed “ethical use of AI”.
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 841
    edited June 16
    Just van Rossum said:

    Additionally: on your website you say the model was trained on about 100GB worth of fonts...     we can dismiss your work as terrible without even looking at the output (which is also terrible).
    Perhaps there's some link between "I trained the model with every single dafont/Behance/CreativeFabrica font I could steal" and "gosh, the output of the model looks a bit crap".
  • ericlu
    ericlu Posts: 13
    I wanted to keep this discussion related to the Gothic Gumdrop font critique and I started this new thread in accordance with the forum rules to answer many of your questions and attacks towards me. I truly appreciate the feedback about the font itself and I will be working to improve it before I submit. Please remember that I'm a human being and I also have real thoughts and feelings myself.
  • Typedesigner
    Typedesigner Posts: 115
    It is important that Google Fonts does not publish AI-generated fonts, neither now nor in the future.
  • Nadine Chahine
    Nadine Chahine Posts: 138
    This is an excellent opportunity for the community (specifically large tech companies, distributers, and foundries) to refuse to publish AI-generated fonts as a matter of principle. If a declaration already exists please point me in its direction otherwise I will start something asap.

    As to the matter of design feedback, I find it distasteful that someone would ask the feedback of the very same humans that one has written software to replace. 
  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 2,066
    Typedesigner said:
    It is important that Google Fonts does not publish AI-generated fonts, neither now nor in the future.
    I also think that's important, but I'm not sure whether Google sees it that way too. Dave seems pretty pro-AI.
  • Typedesigner
    Typedesigner Posts: 115
    edited June 18

    In the European Union, AI-generated content is generally not protected by copyright, since under European law a work requires a human intellectual creation.

  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 841
    (Disclaimer: I contract and provide technical assistance to GF, but I don't make decisions and I'm not speaking for GF in any way; personal opinion only.) I think the main factor for acceptance would not be the tool used but primarily the quality, and I don't believe this font - or anything produced by the current state of AI font generation - would pass that quality bar. At the same time, I'll also note that people are being asked to declare in their submissions whether AI was used in creating the font; which is not something you would do if you were tool-neutral about AI.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,232
    Typedesigner said:

    In the European Union, AI-generated content is generally not protected by copyright, since under European law a work requires a human intellectual creation.


    I believe that the same is true in the United States as well, at least I remember hearing statements to that effect in news coverage.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,140
    I am surprised that someone building a business on AI-generated IP is unaware of the implications of this.

    At least under US copyright law, there is no copyright on AI-generated materials, and as far as I understand it, that means AI generated fonts cannot be licensed under the Open Font License. Public domain is not the same as open source. The OFL has restrictions which can’t be put on AI-generated works (at least, in the USA).

    Given this, I can’t see how Google, which wants all new Google Fonts to be OFL-licensed, could accept any AI-generated font submissions.

    Hybrid copyright situations when some portions of the work have been human-edited, and others have not, might be possible? But that still rules out simply licensing the font under the OFL.

    I am not speaking for Google in any way here.

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