The letters we write with are not abstract shapes. They are the result of a millennia-long process of evolution. A baton, passed down through a hundred generations, and carrying with it the influence of every one of them.
One day, three and a half thousand years ago, someone scratched a picture into the sandstone of the mine where they worked. Maybe it was one of those slow, hot days in late summer, or perhaps the wind was blowing grit around outside. Maybe they listened to the clink of their chisel on the rocks, to its echo over the voices of their friends. The picture they carved was a simple sketch of an ox’s head — maybe their own animal, waiting for them back home. Did they know people would still talk about it today?
The word for ox, in their language, was aleph, and the picture represented the first sound of that word, a. Between then and now, countless other hands changed the shape of that ox-head mark as they wrote it in their own way, until it became unrecognisable, the animal all but forgotten. But the letter remains: it is A.
In the typeface you’re reading now, the shape of A is not symmetrical. Its left side and crossbar are thin, while its right side is thick, and its ‘feet’ are widened into serifs. This too was someone’s work, long ago in that chain of evolution.
In ancient Rome, holding a flat brush in the right hand, a writer could make a cleaner line if they began and ended with a short horizontal flick; this was the origin of the serif. And their wrist was less comfortable rotating the brush to always face its direction of travel, so they would have found it easier to hold at one angle, making strokes of different widths — thicker when pulling it downwards and to the right. Our letters still feature this same stroke modulation today. Did the signwriter know their idea would outlast their civilisation?
When we turn design over to generative AI, we remove the human element from the process. When we ask Midjourney to draw an ox, it does not think of home. ChatGPT will never invent a new calligraphy technique, because it has no wrists to feel uncomfortable. A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.
The writing we use, the very substrate of our culture, is the result of a process older than we can comprehend. Who are we to decide that process is finished? That the time of invention and human input is done, and every letter created from now on should be a remix of what came before?
AI tools perceive reality as a finite set of data, up-to-date as of about 2021: the shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave. Right now they are very good at making shadow puppets, but they cannot see the world outside.
If we allow these tools to dictate our visual culture, we must accept that it will be vitrified by machines which consider a few billion webpages equivalent to the sum total of human existence. I don’t accept that. How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?
There are not enough good typefaces. Just as we will always need new music and new books, we will also always need new type to express our ever-changing perspective on the world. But beyond that, there are languages which barely a fraction of current typefaces support. There are cultures whose experience of typography is a glimpse through a keyhole. AI will never open the door for them: there is not enough training data. And without a thriving type industry, able to support and encourage new designers with new ideas and local expertise, there never will be. If AI’s market share gets too big, the door stays shut forever.
I did not become a type designer for the fame or the Ferraris. It’s a slow, difficult, unreliable job. You can make a living from it, but there’s a good chance you won’t.
I became a type designer because I care about type, and because I want to leave the landscape of typography better than I found it. For that reason and many others, this foundry does not use AI anywhere in our design or production processes. AI might be a scenic path with no hills or hindrances, but it does not lead to the goal we’re chasing. It leads to a fucking desert.
Our work is from human hands. Always has been. Always will be.