image by Erik Bernhardsson

Deep Neural Networks and Fonts

Erik Bernhardsson had a lot of fonts. Which he decided to feed into a neural network. Which he then used to generate new characters.

The result is pretty interesting. It can do a decent job of guessing what a new character would look like for a font that it’s seen some of the letters for. Because the data is now vectors, it can interpolate between two arbitrary fonts. And it can generate entirely new fonts, as seen in the animation above.

The data and source code are available, if you’d like to play around with it yourself. Erik also wrote a followup post linking to a bunch of other font and character generation and analysis stuff.

http://erikbern.com/2016/01/21/analyzing-50k-fonts-using-deep-neural-networks/