Here's What Happens When You Train A Neural Network To Design Typefaces

Typography has its roots in the earliest days of machines, yet type design is deeply personal. Or even understand the basic qualifications of a typeface? It's not a ridiculous question; the past year has seen a huge influx of developers and artists experimenting with machine learning and computer vision, training artificial neural networks to do everything from caption New Yorker cartoons to describe what's happening in the intro to Star Trek. Erik Bernhardsson, a former Spotify engineer who now works at Better, recently published the results of one such experiment online. In a blog post, he explains that he--or more specifically, a script he wrote--collected some 50,000 fonts from around the web.