IDEO has just organized the stunning universe of font with AI

“While exploring what others are doing with machine learning, I found an image created by researcher Andrej Karpathy, who used AI to organize thousands of photos onto a single map through higher order visual recognition” writes Kevin Ho, software designer and project lead at IDEO (pronounced "eye-dee-oh"), the international design and consulting firm founded in Palo Alto, California, in 1991 which uses the design thinking methodology to design products, services, environments, and digital experiences.

“The visualization not only showed how effective AI has become at organizing visual information, but it also made me wonder how it could be applied to daily challenges we face as designers. Choosing a font is one of the most common visual decisions a designer makes. Often, designers fall back on fonts they’ve used before or search within categories like serif, san-serif, or grotesque. These categories are a useful starting point, but even within a font category there is a wide range of aesthetic differences. Plus, even if a designer finds the perfect font, it may not fit when applied to a layout or website. Designers need an easier way to discover alternative fonts with the same aesthetic — so I decided to see if a machine learning algorithm could sort fonts by visual characteristics, and enabling designers to explore type in a new way” he explains.

This is his open invitation to explore IDEO’s AI experiment titled Font Map and be mesmerized by this hyper addictive interactive map of more than 750 fonts organized using machine learning.

“This quick dive into machine learning made me even more excited about the potential to create new, intelligent systems that can aid the design process. Assuming the data is available, mapping thousands of fonts is scalable with this approach. I’m also curious to explore how popular pairings would show up on Font Map. Is there an underlying pattern exposed through visualization that can help us understand what makes a good pairing? The design community here at IDEO came up with these questions and more, creating rich discussions around the role of AI and machine learning. I hope this inspires fellow designers to play around with machine learning and AI, and use these new capabilities in ways that are insightful, inspiring, and valuable” he adds.

Start discovering the interlinking universe of fonts here