What happens when AI comes for our fonts?

The monotype wants you to know what AI could Do in typography. As one of the largest type design companies in the world, Monotype has Helvetica, Futura and Gill without – among 250,000 other fonts. In the typography giant in 2025 Revision Trends reportPublished in February, Monotype devotes an entire chapter to the way in which AI will lead to a reactive typography which “will take advantage of emotional and psychological data” to adapt to the reader. This can put the text to the home when you look at it and soften when your gaze drifts. It could move the fonts depending on the time of day and the level of light. It could even adapt to reading speeds and highlight the important parts of the online text for a greater commitment. AI, suggests the report, will make the type accessible through “smart agents and chatbots” and will allow anyone to generate a typography regardless of the training or design competence. The way it will be deployed is not certain, perhaps in the context of the applications formed. Indeed, how any This will work will remain nebulous.

The monotype is not alone in this type of speculation. Typographers closely monitor AI while designers are starting to adopt tools like Midjourney for ideation and repetition for coding, and explore the potential of GPTs in their workflow. Everywhere in art and design space, creatives join the current gold rush to find THE Case of use of AI in type design. This research continues both with speculation and, in certain places, as creatives repel the idea that creativity itself is the bottleneck that we need to optimize out of the process.

This optimization idea sounds where we were a hundred years ago. At the beginning of the 20th century, the creatives met to debate the implications of rapid industrialization in Europe on art and typography at the Deutscher Werkbund (German Alliance of Craftspeople). Some of these artists rejected the idea of ​​mass production and what it offered artists, while others did everything, leading to the Bauhaus Foundation.

The latter asked multiple vague questions about what the industrialization of typography could mean, with few real ideas on how these questions could be answered. Will typography remain on the page or will it take advantage of the progress of the radio to be both text and sound? Could we develop a universal police force applicable to all contexts? In the end, these experiences were low and the questions were closed, and the real advances were in the efficiency of manufacturing and the design process. The monotype could reopen these old questions, but it is always realistic about AI in the near future.

“Our main objective is to link people to the type they need – everywhere,” explains Charles Nix, main executive director at Monotype, and one of the RevisionAuthors. This is not new for the monotype, which has formed its similarity engine to recognize the fonts since 2015.

But the wider possibilities, known as Nix, are endless, and that’s what makes a typographer NOW So exciting. “I think that at each end of AI parentheses, human beings who are looking for new solutions to problems to use their skills as designers,” he said. “You do not get these opportunities several times during his life, to see a radical change in the way technology plays not only in your industry, but many industries.”

Not everyone is sold. For Zeynep Akay, creative director at Typefet Design Studio Dalton stomachThe results are simply not there to justify being too excited. This does not mean that Dalton Maag rejects AI; The AI ​​assistance potential is significant. Dalton Maag explores the use of AI to mitigate the repetitive tasks of the type design that slows creativity, such as the construction of Kern tables, the writing of OpenYpe functionalities and the diagnosis of police problems. But many designers remain soaked in terms of the prospect of giving up creative control to a generative AI.

“It is almost as if we have skylocked to believe our lives, or our professions, or our creative skills are ephemeral,” explains Akay. She has not yet seen how her generative applications promise a better creative future. “It is a future in which, no doubt, any human intellectual enterprise is launched over time and handing over to AI-and what we gain in return is not entirely clear,” she adds.

For its part, Nix agrees: the most realistic and achievable use of AI is the rationalization of what it calls the work of “really pedantic” typography. The AI ​​could flatten the barrier to entry into design and typography, he says, but “creative thought, this state of being a creative being, is always there, regardless of what we do with the mechanism”.

“Thirty-five years ago, there was a kind of similar thought that the introduction of computer science to design would end up replacing the designers,” he continues. “But for all of us who have spent the last 35 years to create a design using computers, this has not reduced our creativity at all.”

This transition to the digital type is the result of a clear and perceptible need to improve the typographic workflow of the type of handjob to something more immediate, says Akay. In the current space, however, we arrived at the brush before knowing how the canvas appears. As powerful as it could Be, where in our workflow, it must be deployed is not yet understood – if it must be deployed at all, given the results less than stellar that we see in the broader spectrum of the generative AI. This lack of direction makes him wonder if a better analog is not the points bubble of the late 1990s.

In many ways, he reflects our current situation with AI. As public access to the Internet increased, a wave of Dot-Com startups emerged and with them increased venture capital, even if the Internet at the time “was never connected to a practical need for consumers”, explains Akay. Overvalued and without problem to solve or a significant link with consumers, many of these startups crashed in 2000. “But (Internet) returned at a time when there were real problems to solve,” she adds.

Likewise, few consumers exploring AI are professional designers who try to optimize workflow; The AI ​​is more and more the playing field – and the product – leaders who overheard AI as they try to automate jobs and try to repel the creativity of creative professions.

Nix and Akay agree that a similar accident around AI could actually be beneficial to push some of these interests of venture capital. For Nix, however, it is not because his practical need is not immediately obvious that it is not there or, at least, will not become apparent soon. Nix suggests that it could well be beyond the limits of our current field of vision.

Nix adds that in our view of the west of AI, we may not see the difference in our wide selection of fonts and how limited these choices could be for non -Latin scripts, for example. This, and similar areas outside the prevailing western current of design, can be where the need for change is more apparent. “The periphery can end up conducting needs (for AI).”

For all this, it remains unlikely that the current models of sale However, typography will change. We would always be business police licenses like Monotype and Dalton Maag. But in this AI -focused process, these generative applications may well be folded in existing typography subscriptions and the license costs transmitted to us by the payment of these subscription costs.

However, this remains more speculation. We are simply so early that the only IA tools that we can really demonstrate are police identification tools like Whatthefont and related ideas like Typemixer.xyz. It is not possible to understand with precision what this emerging technology will only do according to what it does now – it is like trying to understand a form four dimensions. “What was defined as the type in 1965 is radically different from what we define as the type in 2025,” adds Nix. “We are ready to know that these things are possible to change, and that they will change. But it is difficult at this point to see what part of our current workflows that we preserve, what part of our current understanding and our definition of the typography that we preserve. looks like AI can do. This may seem romantic to those who have already engaged in AI at all costs, but Akay suggests that it is not only a question of mechanics, that creativity is precious “because It is not easy or fast, but rather because it is traditionally the result of work, consideration and risk. “We cannot put the toothpaste in the tube, but, she adds, in the future and an uncertain workflow:” This does not mean that it is built on firm and impartial foundations, and it does not mean that we must be reckless in the present. “