mass-driver

It’s not about throwing out the process, it’s about making sure the end product is the result of intentional decisions rather than just going with the flow of whatever tool is being used. The grain isn’t intrinsically bad, but in a performant typeface you’re going to be reading for hours at a time, over-reliance on a single tool will noticeably harm the readability.

By switching between digital and analogue drawing tools, you’re translating the work between different media, and the act of translation is what smooths over the bumps of any single tool.

AI might eventually become good at fiddling with the béziers, but doing that part manually is an essential part of the process. If you don’t fully understand how the béziers naturally behave (and when to lean into or push back against that, for both aesthetic and technical reasons), the end result will be meaningfully worse.

To answer your first question: almost all good fonts start with sketches on paper. Every tool has a kind of grain, a sort of ‘shape language’ it pushes you towards making, and the bézier curves fonts use internally are surprisingly opinionated.

The first few months of any new typeface involve switching between physical and digital drawings frequently, trying to make sure no single tool has too much influence over the shape.

AI might be just another tool, but its grain is super unpredictable. Refining AI-generated sketches is more complicated, and ultimately the skills it requires can only be developed through firsthand practice of analogue techniques. I literally studied stonecarving (along with calligraphy, brush lettering, etc.) in order to be able to make better digital fonts.

Hey, I’m the author of this article. Just thought I’d share some context, since HN is a little outside the intended audience:

- We’re a tiny design studio specialising in fonts, so our website was (maybe predictably) not set up to handle a big traffic spike. It should be stable now.

- This article was written in response to some font industry discussions on the same topic. It’s a collection of thoughts rather than a manifesto, and there’s nuance which it doesn’t go into. I’m not a die-hard AI hater, just opposed to careless use of it within this narrow field.

Appreciate the more reasonable comments!

Sorry for the disruption! This is 100x our normal peak traffic, needed to raise the instance limit.