Type Faces
An AI’s imagination of popular fonts as people
Fonts have always been seen through a lens of personification — be it their anatomy or their personality. So, I asked an AI artist to paint me portraits of some.
The process was quite simple using Midjourney — “a proprietary artificial intelligence program that creates images from textual descriptions”. While some results were spot on, others had to be iterated upon. I upscaled the images that I liked, followed by remastering to add finer details to the faces generated by the algorithm.
Baskerville is a serif typeface designed in the 1750s by John Baskerville in Birmingham, England, and cut into metal by punchcutter John Handy. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, intended as a refinement of what are now called old-style typefaces of the period, especially those of his most eminent contemporary, William Caslon. Compared to earlier designs popular in Britain, Baskerville increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes, making the serifs sharper and more tapered, and shifted the axis of rounded letters to a more vertical position. (Wikipedia)
Bodoni is the name given to the serif typefaces first designed by Giambattista Bodoni in the late eighteenth century and frequently revived since. Bodoni’s typefaces are classified as Didone or modern. Bodoni followed the ideas of John Baskerville — increased stroke contrast reflecting developing printing technology and a more vertical axis — but he took them to a more extreme conclusion. As Massimo Vignelli, the famous Italian designer, stated — “Bodoni is one of the most elegant typefaces ever designed.” (Wikipedia)
Didot is a group of typefaces described as neoclassical, and evocative of the Age of Enlightenment. The name Didot came from the famous French printing and type producing Didot family. The most famous Didot typefaces were developed in the period 1784–1811. The typeface takes inspiration from John Baskerville’s experimentation with increasing stroke contrast and a more condensed armature. A note-worthy usage of Didot is in the Zara logo that caused quite a bit of uproar for its “uncomfortably close” kerning. (Wikipedia)
Bookman evolved from fonts known as Old Style Antique, released around 1869. These were created as a bold version of the “Old Style” typeface, which had been cut by Alexander Phemister around the 1850s for the Miller & Richard foundry and become a standard, popular book typeface. A wide, legible design that is slightly bolder than most body text faces, Bookman has been used for both display typography and for trade printing such as advertising, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. (Wikipedia)
Designed by Paul Renner, Futura is based on geometric shapes, especially the circle, similar in spirit to the Bauhaus design style of the period. It was developed as a contribution to the New Frankfurt project, a radical affordable housing project in Frankfurt, Germany that many renowned modernist architects at the time were involved in. Described as “the typeface of our time” and “a face representing the new typography of the European avant-garde”, Futura was released to stand out against the sans-serif and more elaborate, handwritten-style typefaces that were popular at the time in order to promote simplicity, modernism and industrialization. (Wikipedia)
Times New Roman was commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration with Victor Lardent, a lettering artist in The Times’s advertising department. The idea was to change their news typeface from a spindly nineteenth-century face to a more robust, solid design, returning to traditions of printing from the eighteenth century and before. It has become one of the most popular typefaces of all time and is installed on most desktop computers. (Wikipedia)
Helvetica, originally known as Neue Haas Grotesk, was developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Its neo-grotesque design is influenced by the famous 19th-century typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk and other German and Swiss designs. Its use became a hallmark of the International Typographic Style that emerged from the work of Swiss designers in the 1950s and ’60s, becoming one of the most popular typefaces of the mid-20th century. (Wikipedia)
Arial’s design is based on 19th-century sans-serifs, but is regularized to be more suited to continuous body text and to form a cohesive font family. The typeface was designed in 1982, by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, for Monotype Typography. Each of its characters has the same width as that character in Helvetica; the purpose of this design is to allow a document designed in Helvetica to be displayed and printed with the intended line breaks and page breaks without a Helvetica license. (Wikipedia)
Trajan’s design is based on the letterforms of “capitalis monumentalis”or Roman square capitals, as used for the inscription at the base of Trajan’s Column from which the typeface takes its name. Trajan is an all-capitals typeface, as the Romans did not use lowercase letters. Twombly created the design taking inspiration from a full-size picture of a rubbing of the inscription. It is well known for appearing on many film posters. (Wikipedia)
Century Gothic, a digital typeface by Monotype Imaging, is a redrawn version of Monotype’s own Twentieth Century, a copy of Bauer’s Futura, to match the widths of ITC Avant Garde Gothic. It is an exclusively digital typeface that has never been manufactured as a metal type. Its origins come from a design intended for large-print uses such as headings and signs, and so it has a reasonably purely geometric design closely based on the circle and square, with less variation in stroke width than fonts designed for small sizes tend to show, and a relatively slender design in its default weight. (Wikipedia)
Georgia, designed in 1993 by Matthew Carter and hinted by Tom Rickner for the Microsoft Corporation, was intended as a serif typeface that would appear elegant but legible when printed small or on low-resolution screens. The typeface is similar to Times New Roman, but as a design for screen display, it has a larger x-height and fewer fine details. (Wikipedia)
Designed by Vincent Connare and released in 1994 by Microsoft Corporation, Comic Sans is a non-connecting script inspired by comic book lettering, intended for use in cartoon speech bubbles, as well as in other casual environments, like informal documents and children’s materials. The typeface’s widespread use, often in situations it was not intended for, has been the subject of criticism and mockery. (Wikipedia)
