AI, Curation, Ongoing Project

Fonts as People

An ongoing project in which I use A.I. in the form of Midjourney to visualise what fonts would look like if they were people.


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The Logo

I have heard numerous complaints from designers that A.I. will take away their jobs. Previous attempts I had made at generating logos Midjourney were unsuccessful until this project.

I wanted something simple, so asked Midjourney to generate “a stick man in the shape of the letter f“.
Below is what it generated first time round. The top right one to me looks like a pretty strong concept, it just needed some tweaking.

What would have taken me a few hours to figure out myself, it did in a matter of minutes.

I still don’t think A.I. will take away anyone’s design job. A person is still needed to direct it. It’s not that different from outsourcing to a freelancer. In this case, it did 80% of the brain work, but it still required a human touch to tweak it.

This was a few months ago and the rate that this technology develops is astounding, so I have no doubt it can do 100% of the job, tweaks included.

but that would have required additional prompts and they can be hit and miss. On top of that, clients not only don’t often know what they want, they have a hard time articulating it.

Logos generated by Midjourney

Converted to vector art

Final design

Curation

I put in a prompt to Midjourney, something along the lines of /imagine: comic sans font as a person.

I sometimes throw in some key words that visually describe the font to help create a more true to form depiction if the initial generated people don’t really embody the font. This is where the curation aspect comes in.

Refinement

I try to keep my own personal vision of what these people should be like out of the equation. I see myself more as a curator, refining the results to ensure that they stay true to the original prompt and that any additional or random artifacts such as peculiar approximations of actual fonts are omitted.