Typography History on AI

Carl Shank • February 23, 2023

Typography and Artificial Intelligence

A new way to retrieve information about most any topic, including typography, is offered through AI – artificial intelligence. More precisely, through ChatGPT, which allows the user to ask a question to an AI generated interface, a user can freely investigate topics that once took hours of painstaking research. Two models I have used, one which is free to the user (openai.com) and another service (ai-pro, which costs about $20 per month but is much more sophisticated) allow the user to get decent and mostly accurate information about most any topic. I typed into the chat box "history of typography" and "modern typography" and received the following AI generated answers:


"Typography is an artform that has evolved since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Its evolution has been driven by the technological advancements in typesetting and printing. During the 15th and 16th centuries, type design was largely influenced by the Gothic style. This style featured the use of slab serifs, intricate patterns, and large decorative flourishes. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, new typefaces emerged based on the Romanesque style, a style of lettering developed by Italian priests in the Vatican as a response to the Gothic style. This style is more simplified and is often used in book typesetting today. The late 19th century saw the emergence of the Art Deco style, which featured strong contrast and geometric typefaces. This style was the source of most of the typefaces used throughout the twentieth century. The mid-twentieth century was an important period in typography, as it was during this time that the sans-serif style began to increase its prevalence. Sans-serif fonts such as Helvetica, Futura, and Arial became popular, largely replacing the Art Deco typefaces of earlier decades. Today, typography has become a specialized artform. It is used in almost every aspect of visual arts and design and continues to evolve as new technologies emerge. Computers and digital printing have allowed typographers to create intricate and complex typefaces and forms unlike anything seen before. Computers have also changed the way that typefaces are delivered, allowing designers to manipulate them in a variety of ways to create visual effects and combinations."


"The history of typography is a story of technological progress and aesthetic trends. It begins in the 15th century with the invention of the printing press and the spread of movable type. In this period, traditional calligraphic letterforms were adapted for print, leading to a variety of typefaces with elaborate serifs, ornaments and flourishes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the typewriter and the photograph led to increased speed in typesetting, and the industrial revolution brought with it a fascination for the mechanized application of type. Late 19th and 20th century saw revolutions in type design with the appearance of sans-serif typefaces and the development of new technologies such as linotype and phototypesetting. These new technologies gave typographers more control over the design of typefaces and increased the speed of typesetting and printing. New typefaces designed in the last decades of the 20th century, such as Helvetica, Univers and Frutiger, are still widely used today. The early 21st century saw an explosion of digital technology, with the birth of desktop publishing, the World Wide Web, and digital font applications. This digital revolution made typefaces more widely available, and ushered in a new era of typographic exploration. Fonts that were once only available to professional designers and printers are now at the fingertips of everyone with a computer and an internet connection. As the digital age continues to evolve, typography will surely continue its fascinating journey."


When I asked the AI Chat about "modern typography," I got the following response: "Modern typography is the practice of arranging and designing type in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and enhances the readability and legibility of written language. It emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century as a response to the changing technological and cultural landscape of the time, particularly the rise of industrialization, mass media, and global communication.


Some of the most important writers and inventors of modern typography include:


Jan Tschichold: A German typographer and designer who played a significant role in the development of modern typography. He was a proponent of asymmetrical typography and advocated for the use of sans-serif fonts in printed materials.


Eric Gill: A British sculptor, typeface designer, and printmaker who is best known for his typeface designs, including Gill Sans and Perpetua. He was a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts movement and his work had a significant influence on modern typography.


Paul Renner: A German typographer and typeface designer who is best known for creating the iconic Futura typeface. Futura became one of the most popular and widely used typefaces of the 20th century and had a significant impact on modern typography.


Adrian Frutiger: A Swiss typeface designer who created some of the most widely used typefaces of the 20th century, including Univers, Frutiger, and Avenir. His work was characterized by a focus on clarity, legibility, and simplicity.


Herb Lubalin: An American graphic designer and typographer who is best known for his work on magazines such as Avant Garde and Eros. He was a pioneer of expressive typography and used type as a visual element in his designs.


These and other writers and inventors of modern typography have had a profound influence on the field of graphic design and continue to inspire new generations of designers today."


A couple of things to note. First, these answers are quite general, but mostly accurate for generalized information. They fail to elucidate what standard typographical texts say about typography. They give summary statements. You can drill down in the Chat and ask more specific questions and the AI will usually cooperate, but this is different than reading a typographical history book on the subject. However, the AI Chat does give enough information, as a starting point, to the study of typography.


Try it out for yourself!




Successful Layout & Design

Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble?

By Carl Shank • February 12, 2026
Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble? The latest Google estimate of available fonts is over 300,000 and counting. Other estimates have catalogued over 550,000 fonts. There are over 36,000 font families, over 4,000 type designers and over 2,700 professional font foundries, not counting smaller font entrepreneurs like CARE Typography, which provides restored fonts from yesteryear. (Quora source https://www.quora.com/How-many-fonts-are-there-in-existence-Does-any-group-attempt-to-keep-a-record-of-all-the-fonts-that-exist ) There are commercial fonts from sources like Adobe and MyFonts (Monotype) which require payment for their use in various platforms. Both provide a subscription service, which usually requires a substantial monthly or yearly fee to download and use their fonts. When I began using Apple Macintoshes in the 1980s, font manufacturers like Adobe and Monotype would “sell” the right to use a number of their fonts for thousands of dollars. And, by the way, you never really “own” the font. You have paid only for the use of the font for a specific purpose or machine. Moreover, the price varies for print use, or web use, or a digital ad use. Even today, the font Trinité Titling by Bram de Does, used in a number of Bibles and biblical studies, costs over $4,000 for the use on a single computer and much more for a number of computer users. Individual users of such fonts are mostly priced out of their budget. Why the seemingly extravagant cost? We had a valve on one of our household plumbing lines go bad. I called the plumber, and he replaced the valve — at a cost of several hundred dollars, while the valve itself cost only a few dollars. Was that fair? Yes, because I was paying for the time and training and effort going into replacing that valve in my house. The same holds true for professional font designers. They spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours in font development. We are paying for their livelihood. Font licenses cover four basic parameters around font usage — “The What: The weight and style of the typeface; The Where: Literally where you’ll use the font – a website, digital ad, or in print; The Who: The number times a font can be installed on a computer (aka the number of people who can use it); The How many: For example, web font licenses describe the number of allotted page views, and app and digital marketing licenses set similar parameters.” (Monotype Report) Companies like Monotype are rarely concerning with an individual using a font for a home, individualized project, but rather an entire design company or printer using that font for commercial gain and advertising dollars. There are fonts available “for personal use only,” prohibiting their use for commercial or money-making projects. There are what have been called “shareware” fonts, fonts with a minimal cost which require attribution of the type designer or provider on projects. Most fonts provide a EULA, or font license, which outlines and determines the legal restrictions and ramifications for their use. What about free fonts? Monotype warns against using unlicensed or what are called “free” fonts for several valid reasons, but, in my opinion, this is an obvious ploy to get the user to buy or subscribe to their font services. One Monotype report cites six issues associated with what are deemed “free” fonts. Free fonts may pop up in similar ads or designs to industry competition, perhaps prompting a lawsuit or cease-and-desist actions. Free fonts often have the inability to scale, add special characters, or even different alphabets. Free fonts have limited creative scope. They may be saddled with malware or software viruses. Poor font design can be a problem with such fonts. A sixth problem with so-called free fonts is that they can be actually “pirated” fonts, copied from legitimately designed fonts. “Aside from branding issues, free fonts also suffer from a whole host of performance issues. Fonts are software files that interact with applications and the operating system on which it’s installed; without the guidance of a skilled font engineer, rendering issues may arise from crashing glyphs, or a lack of proper kerning (the space between glyphs) text in certain scenarios. A free font downloaded from a random website might not support a broad range of languages and or complex scripts (e.g., Japanese or Arabic), or basic diatrics to cover commonly used Latin languages.” (Monotype Report) Monotype maintains that free fonts won’t give a company the individual style it deserves to help it stand out in the marketplace. They also point to the legal ramifications involved with font licensing, not a glamorous subject but one in which company attorneys are hired to examine for possible litigation. Types of Free Fonts There are four sources of free fonts — Open Source fonts with an SIL Open Font License (SEE https://openfontlicense.org ); OS fonts, fonts that come with your operating system and hardware; Subscription add-on fonts that come as an add-on to a subscription service; and, advertised free fonts by independent font designers, such as CARE Typography. Many or most of such free fonts come from freeware, shareware, public domain or demo fonts downloaded or reconstructed from an archive or library, like Internet Archive. Companies such as Website Planet offer free “commercial” fonts, fonts that can be used in business and corporate applications. See https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/best-free-fonts/. Several cautions, however, are still in order here. First, a font that “looks like” a standard, business font is not the same thing as its “older brother.” An example is Website Planet’s Playfair Display font, both a variable and static font designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen licensed under the SIL Open Font License agreement. Yet, this font looks a lot like the standard Bodoni font, created by Giambattista Bodoni in 1767 and revived by Morris Fuller Benton in 1911 under Linotype’s commercial license.

More On The Greek Font

By Carl Shank • December 23, 2025
More on the Greek font. In a previous post ( It's Greek To Me! March 18, 2023) we noted that Cursive Greek type appeared as a chancery script by Francesco Griffo in 1502 and lasted two hundred years. Robert Bringhurst notes that "chancery Greeks were cut by many artists from Garamond to Cason, but Neoclassical and Romantic designers . . . all returned to simpler cursive forms . . . in the English speaking world the cursive Greek most often seen is the one designed in 1806 by Richard Porson." This face has been the "standard Greek face for the Oxford Classical Texts for over a century." ( Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Version 3.1, 2005 , pp. 274, 278) In fact, asking Google for the best Greek face to use, it points us to Porson Greek. Porson is a beautiful Unicode Font for Greek. It's not stiff, like many of the cleaner fonts, which are usually san serif. It is bold and easy to read and seems to more closely match the orthography in newer textbooks. (Jan 8, 2004) 
Show More