Taking The Robots To Design School
What happens when you try to teach a machine everything we know about typography? In 2016 I started finding out.
About a year ago I started working on merging typographic design and artificial intelligence. I'm writing the contents of my brain to hypertext right now, in May 2016: partially because it's fun to talk about, partially as journalling for my future self, and mostly because I want more people to think about these things.
Background
For as long as I’ve been a designer I’ve been captivated by mathematical purity in design systems. I've always been a huge fan of Swiss design; maybe my all-time favorite designer is Karl Gerstner with his work in programmatic design. In 2011 I had my a first quick shot at working on systemized algorithmic web layouts at Prismatic (RIP); then captivated by the 2014 article about Flipboard’s layout algorithm I resolved to shift my design career towards abstractions and work on ((meta-)meta-)meta-design systems and tools to enable more powerful forms of thought amongst human designers.
Rolling forward to spring 2015, I started working at The Grid - a startup working on AI-generated websites. For context, the product was somewhere around a Squarespace or Wix kind of deal - it allowed for non-designers to quickly create great looking websites. The twist was that instead of templates or themes, sophisticated design algorithms would work with the content to design a website custom to the user. Cool. As good a venue as any to explore design systems; I was tasked by the creative director and CEO to make the typography system 'better'.