Typography designer Elliot Jay Stocks on AI disrupting fonts and the indie foundry business model

Elliot and I am a designer and author. I'm here. I'm speaking tomorrow so I can relax today. I just have to enjoy it. I've just seen one of my very old friends do a fantastic uh, presentation on stage named Dylan Field. uh t well Tim Vanam and yeah they just announced some amazing stuff and it's great to be here.

So what's your talk about tomorrow? It's about typography. Typography in design systems. Very cool. Uh give us give us the full backstory. Uh I I you I mean I'll go out on a limb and say you're you're the godfather of type. It's a little bit dramatic but uh that certainly have had a massive on on type on type online.

So, uh, yeah, I would love would love kind of hear the the full journey. Cool. That's, uh, that's, uh, kind of you to say. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. Um, yeah. Um, I mean, I' I've been super lucky to kind of work in the type industry for for many years. I did a bunch of stuff with Adobe Fonts.

Um, I'm now actually doing some more stuff with Adobe Fonts and uh and Google Fonts as well. And I I like to kind of balance things like writing about typography and about about design with actually being hands-on in the tools as well.

Um and and yeah, it's been uh it's it's been great to just get to get to shadow everyone. What is the structure of the industry?

Uh I imagine that there's the big players Adobe, Google, like you mentioned, who are buying lots of fonts, but then there's also companies that need whole fonts for their own brand systems and their design systems, I'm sure.

So, uh is that kind of the shape of the industry or is there another player that's really important? Um how would you break it down? It's the independent firms that make some of the fonts that you use and interact with uh on a daily basis.

Even some of the fonts that I'm I'm sure we use at at TBPN, but but would love to understand the market structure. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean the those indie foundaries that you mentioned are kind of uh you know the backbone of of the industry really because even you got folks like uh Adobe for instance, they that library is made up of a bunch of different foundry partners and so they are not owned by companies like Adobe.

They are independent practitioners. A lot of the time they are like oneperson bands a lot of the time, you know, super super indie. Obviously, you've got folks like Monotype as well who do own large libraries and they have they have their IP.

Uh but the the type industry is really just made up of of a huge number of independent foundaries who are then use those distribution channels like Adobe Fonts um etc. to get stuff on there.

Monotype have my fonts as well which is also another big uh channel and the the differentiator I suppose is like Google fonts they are open source. Yeah. Um and so they tend to not um exist elsewhere although Adobe Fonts does pull in those as well. Uh one second we're going to pull in Gary Tan. He's just stopping by.

Gary, great to see you. How you doing? Great to see you. I know you got to get out of here quickly. Good to see you. Busy man. It's great to see you. H how's your Figma config been? Oh, it's been sick. Yeah. All I wanted to say was keep mogging, guys. Keep mogging. always be mogging. We'll see Gary.

Well, uh I'm sure you know you do you familiar with Gary? I have not counc Y Combinator also uh quite an accomplished designer a bunch of the logos of of some biggest companies. But anyways, good friends. So So I want to know more about the the the business model of working with Adobe.

Uh is it like Spotify where like you put your stuff up and then the more it gets used, the more you get paid or is it more of like a one-off deal? Is it selling a book?

the the yeah usage is is uh shared to yes so the successful fonts that get more usage okay uh they they get more money yeah basically are is it at the level where people are trying to you know pay influencers to use their fonts to promote them go trendy no I mean viral so so from my perspective how mature is the industry from my pers perspective I mean you can see this sort of hype cycle with individual fonts where you know one uh you know oftent times you know one designer will will leverage a font in a really unique way and then three months later sort of an explosion of sites using that and um you know we've even had uh we've we've had people that have been maybe a little bit too inspired by what we're doing at TBPN actually you know find the font that we use for our logo and sort of use that for their logo and you know it's it's all you know mostly fair game on the internet but yeah it's I mean you can never predict how that stuff takes off as well there is foundaries obviously try and look at trends and see what's doing well and sometimes try to replicate that.

But sometimes if something blows up and there's no real reason, it comes from maybe someone using it or whatever. And some foundaries have done very well at that.

I know some type designers who've struggled for many years and slogged away and they've released one thing and it blows up and they can go buy a house, you know. Yeah, it's a business just like music at least like Spotify. Totally. Yeah.

Are there specific eras of font design, typography design that you think of uh as you tell the story of how typography has evolved over the last like I don't know 50 100 years or something?

I mean it's driven by technology a lot when you think of like the move from metal type wood type photoype setting early digital type when you look at like uh sort of what we know of as fonts these days you know you got the 80s so the '9s when folks like font shop really pioneered that originally uh making them available on you know actual physical discs and then obviously online and that would really radically change things and you had web fonts come along in around sort of what sort of 20 2009 2010 which before that you couldn't use anything on your websites other than you know Georgia, Ariel, Donna, Tiny Roman, you know, and people forget that that was, you know, a pretty huge thing for web design and I was I was a web designer exclusively at that time and it was a kind of a wild time to to be working on the web and with all this sort of new stuff that we had to play with.

So, how how is the industry reacting and responding to generative AI? I mean, I I haven't played around with any tools around type myself, but I imagine we're not far away from somebody kind of saying, "Hey, I like these three fonts. Generate me something net new.

" And yeah, it is kind of odd that Chad GPT when they generate images, they can now do text pretty effectively. But they're not using an actual font, you know, library, like a source source. It's kind of just creating its own on the fly. Yeah. I mean like everything with AI it's it's just changing dayto day.

Um there are definitely some experiments going on. There are some like entirely AI generated fonts font generators which have mixed results. Um but yeah there are some tools you know which will generate images and as part of that is text as part of that.

Um there is some recent huge um uh leaps been made in that like the designer Jessica Hish has been posting a bunch of stuff that some experiments she's been doing with chat GPT where she you know she's a very accomplished lettering artist but looking she's looking at what chat GPT can actually uh put out and it's actually you know the the progress is incredible.

It's now ability to to actually do some halfdeent lettering is is um you know it's it's super interesting where where you look at a few months ago and you'd be lucky if you could even have like the right words spelled correctly you know or No that was always that was the the most quick way to identify if something was AI generated was just how badly all the text was botched.

Exactly. But it's certainly Yeah. It's getting getting uncanny. We're pushing past the uncanny valley now. How do you think the what do you how do you expect kind of the business models of the industry to evolve?

I imagine I I can see it going, you know, the way of of fashion to some degree where, you know, maybe in the future you can get kind of a um factory uh a factory font that was just generated.

But but there's something about you know typography that's almost soulful you know and you you discover you know um something you can just see you can feel you know the the attention that was put into it.

Do where do you expect the kind of um how do you expect kind of the industry to evolve and and kind of the business models to evolve uh as as you know assuming I think we can safely assume that generative AI will be you know twice as good at type and a year, right? Maybe maybe more.

Yeah, I mean to totally AI generated uh fonts are coming for sure. Like it's it's going to be a thing. Um and it is interesting for the business because um at least in um in the US you can't you can't copyright uh a design. You can you can trademark a name.

So you know things like Helvetica are always going to be trademarked and known by monotype, but you can't uh copyright the outlines. So you know it's interesting uh models can learn from all of the type that's out there. Also type by its very nature is very systems based.

There are there's plenty of like maths in there and and metrics and things which are in a sense easy to easy to replicate. I mean my my hope personally is as a creative person and a and a great supporter of all type designers out there.

Hope that there will always be a market for people who want to make type and have a something very bespoke and and something that with got a lot of feeling and love put put into it.

Um but for sure AI fonts are coming and I think it's it's going to massively disrupt the industry in the same way that all those previous technological advances also changed the font industry. Give us some spice. Most overrated font. Most underrated font. Take some shots. I want to hear. I don't know.

You can go way back. Let Let's see. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, there I I maybe met commentary, but what does the community typically say is overrated? I mean, the community tends to people like free stuff, right? So, a lot of people use um use stuff from places like Google Fonts that provide fonts for free.

Um and it's great. There are some sb quality stuff and they've done a lot of work recently to really improve the technical quality of their library. Uh but it's important to remember that when you're using something for free, obviously lots of other people also using it for free.

So to get that differentiation, still the kind of easy hack is to effectively to to pay for a font, whether that's through a subscription service like Adobe Fonts or just buying the font outright from the foundry. So that's always a good way to get something that's super unique. Yeah. Mhm. Amazing.

Well, thank you so much. I think we have our next guest ready to come in. Thanks for stopping by. Good luck with your talk tomorrow. Thanks so much. Hope you get We'll see you on the internet. All right. See you then. Thanks, guys. Cheers. This is great. And we have Andrew Reed coming into the studio next.

Second time appearance. I'm sure he is uh doing deals out there, writing term sheets on napkins, uh finding the next Figma. There he is. How you doing, Andrew? What's going on? Am I live? Yeah. Yeah, you're live. You can throw on the headphones, talking to the microphone. How are you doing? Good to meet you in person.

There we go. Thank you guys for having me. What's too loud? I You might be able to adjust it, but No, it's perfect. Okay, great. Um uh yeah. H how's it been? Is this your