Interesting AI platforms to inspire you

As far as I know (January 2023), there is no other platform where projects with type design and AI tools are published. But there are similar related platforms that present projects with AI tools.

GitHub

GitHub is commonly used to host open source software development projects and is one of the largest source code hosts. Not only is the code shared, each repository also includes a Readme.md file in which the developers can explain the code and include images if necessary. Feedback can be given via issues or pull requests, or suggestions for changes can be added. This platform is for any kind of software and not only for AI models. The platform Huggin Face has specialized in this. Here, users can find a large number of AI models that can either be tried out directly on the site or access to these models is provided. There is also a community function to discuss problems. Both platforms are mainly there to share code in repositories and if so only show examples of the output. The design of both websites is very functional and minimalistic. The focus is on finding the way around quickly and colours other than black, white or grey are used sparingly.

Experiments with Google

The website Experiments with Google dedicates an entire subpage to various AI experiments. On the detail pages, you get a short overview of the project, can have a look at the code and, in the best case, try out the project directly. There are no categories that explicitly deal with type design, but related experiments by other developers and designers can still be found. The project Handwriting with a Neural Net estimates what your next letter will look like based on the letters you have just written. The website is not structured like a blog, as there are usually always different authors and developers, but the overview and the short illustrated description about the projects show the broad experimental character of the topic. As a font, a classic Typewriter font was chosen to give the feeling of coding. The colours consist only of black, white and grey tones to soothe the impression of the many different images of the individual projects. There is no community area and the process of the projects is rarely shown.

Instagram

You can follow the process closely on Instagram. In the area of type design and AI tools, there are a few accounts that share their work. Anna Fay is a motion designer who shows her experiments with AI tools and letters on her channel Honigwespe. She uses different AI tools, like Stable Diffusion and styleGAN. She puts special emphasis on the textures and abstract shapes of the creations, but gives only minimal insight into her thoughts and ideas behind the generated images. The channel Aesthetics_imperfections, run by Gianpaolo Tucci, shows experimental attempts to use AI tools in the field of type design and lettering. He often combines organic forms and lets them merge into letters. He uses the AI tool Midjourney, does not disclose the prompts he enters, i.e. the creativity part, but only shows the results from the AI tool. So on Instagram you can find inspiring images from AI tools, but rarely the process or the prompts entered to understand the designer‘s thoughts. This is a structural problem of Instagram and for me personally, it always calls into question the creative value of the uploaded images.

Honigwespe [l], Aesthetics_imperfections [r]

On this website, I mainly want to illustrate the process of my experiments, for which a blog offers me the optimal opportunity. Here I can describe more than on Instagram and show the visual output. But I also want to share background information and the work of others and introduce different categories for this. In addition, it should be possible to write comments and exchange ideas with me and others. The design of the website should be functional and inviting without taking the focus away from the experiments. I would like to deliberately do without a typewriter font for reasons of distinction.