Qosmo AI-Generated Rabbit Phase Calendar 2023
(日本語の記事はこちらからご覧いただけます）
Introduction
Happy New Year!
Every year, Qosmo sends a small gift as a greeting to our friends and customers. Last year and the year before last, we produced original masks but this year, we created an AI-Generated Rabbit Phase Calendar. A calendar is a common new year gift in Japan but we gave it an original twist using rabbit, this year’s zodiac sign.
Since ancient times, the craters’ pattern on the moon was associated with rabbits in Japan and other Asian countries. Using the rabbit and the moon phases as our theme, we got help from Stable Diffusion, an image-generation AI which made a major hit last year, to play on typography.
Technology
Stable diffusion is an AI model known to generate images. Since its release in August, it has been used and abused by many professionals in and outside of the AI field including artists and designers to innovate their work in new directions. At Qosmo, we used Stable Diffusion to generate the visual performance that accompanied the AI DJ project as it was performed in MUTEK.JP last December. We wrote about this on this article.
Stable Diffusion is better known to generate from input text prompts but it also has a mode called img2img. In this mode, you upload an image along with a text prompt to condition the output. We experimented in this mode to morph numerical typefaces with rabbit illustrations. Here are some examples of existing fonts transformed into “rabbit fonts”.
One of the advantages of generative AI is it generates many variations. Stable Diffusion can generate variations changing the random seed. At this time, our design process consisted of a human designer choosing the best designs.
Using img2img, you can also change the strength of the manifestation of the text prompt by changing a generation setting. The following shows how this gradual change creates a gradation of typeface changes. As mentioned above, we made this strength (“rabbit-ness”) represent the changing moon phases over the months.
Design
Let’s look back at the design process here.
1st proof
After trying a number of ideas, we came down to the idea of rabbit font generation discussing in our team.
2nd proof
We studied serif and san-serif fonts. Serif fonts have an organic design that made it easier to incorporate rabit-ness. This lead to lack of legibility of serif based design and we finally decided to go with san-serif. Look at the following to see what happened with both.
Final proof
In the final step, we used the technique illustrated above to simulate the moon-phase changes that happen over 29.5 days. Since new moon to full moon takes 14.75 days, we used 15 levels of rabit-ness scale and generated 6 variations to choose from. New moon font was chosen from rabbit-ness 0 generations and full moon was from 15 and so on. Placing the numbers in the order of the calendar, we finalized our moon-phase calendar.
Finally
This year we experimented with a generative design for our annual greeting. We are much excited about the development of generative AI technology with a lot of anticipation for this year. We look forward to sharing with you our new art and projects this year.
