The forms of artificial reading
Look: We have to talk about AI.
Early explorations with AI type design tools.
Matthieu Salvaggio, the founder of Blaze Type, investigated AI type design tools as part of Human Types. Blaze Type co-created six limited fonts with an AI type design tool to explore what a machine would design if provided with a limited range of characters. The findings offer valuable insights into how AI-generated designs, based on human-created libraries, can either differ from, or align with human design choices.
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Monotype
How did Blaze Type come to be?
I’ve always wanted to have my own place to release fonts. My goal when I was a student was to spend half my time teaching and making custom work, and the rest in developing typefaces for my own foundry. I had the opportunity to do that for a couple of years. Blaze Type eventually grew from a one-person outlet into a multi-platform studio with many designers.
What makes the way you do things as a studio so unique?
To be honest, we have a rather straightforward approach to work: we tackle it. One of our specialties is that we know a great deal about variable fonts and engineering, so we do spend a lot of time on developing quality technical typefaces. We also mix a lot of historical references with new aesthetics, which tends to give interesting results.
How do you see AI playing a role in your work?
It would be a mistake to say it’s not going to take part in our day-to-day activities. We already use some AI tools for text proofing, day-to-day activities. AI is definitely going to continue to develop and play a big part in most future design projects. AI may not be ready to work in the concepting part of our work (yet) but more so in technical proof set up, production development, and so on.
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The expressive world of Blaze type’s custom typography.
What did you create as a response to the Human Types brief?
We produced work based on some of our existing fonts: Apoc, Fusion, Rules, Sagittaire, and Sizek. We input key control characters from each typeface into a Monotype beta AI tool to see what letterforms it would create with basic set ups. For type design students, it’s a common type design exercise to take a few letters from a street sign, for example, and develop out the rest of the font based on those characters. So we tried to do the same thing with AI by making it produce a basic character set A‑Z and a‑z based on control characters. It was quite interesting to see what the AI designed, it really felt like a student approaching the subject. The overall concepts in the font clearly showed in the production, even with the imperfections and trials the AI tool generated. We were really inspired by the idea of comparing AI to a student and I think we had good results in that sense.
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AI can output the initial skeleton and establish stroke weights. Clean, reliable curves less so.
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The output of AI makes for an exciting collaboration that deviates from a designers expectations.
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AI tends to introduce inflection points and bumps that for now, put the onus back on human eyes and craft skills.
“We were really inspired by the idea of comparing AI to a student and I think we had good results in that sense.”
Matthieu Salvaggio
How do you see humans and AI working together?
I think that AI, like any new technology, is frightening and challenging. It will have a huge impact on any market it touches. It is going to change our society on deeper levels.
But it is also a marvelous thing to witness and use and discover. If we manage things well, it’s going to be an amazing adventure to be working with AI in our day-to-day activities. Production-wise, I think AI is going to be a massive game changer. I’d like to keep my eye on how AI will integrate with concepting, but it’s certain that people are going to use AI on projects from A to Z at some point.
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Type Trends 2025. The latest in type design, from the Monotype Studio.