Evotype: Towards the Evolution of Type Stencils

TL;DR

This paper introduces Evotype, an evolutionary system that uses genetic algorithms and hill climbing to generate type stencils, aiding designers in creating coherent and expressive typefaces efficiently.

Contribution

It presents a novel evolutionary computation framework for designing type stencils, combining genetic algorithms with hill climbing for improved glyph coherence.

Findings

Effective generation of coherent glyphs demonstrated

Framework balances legibility, coherence, and expressiveness

Practical application in typeface design shown

Abstract

Typefaces are an essential resource employed by graphic designers. The increasing demand for innovative type design work increases the need for good technological means to assist the designer in the creation of a typeface. We present an evolutionary computation approach for the generation of type stencils to draw coherent glyphs for different characters. The proposed system employs a Genetic Algorithm to evolve populations of type stencils. The evaluation of each candidate stencil uses a hill climbing algorithm to search the best configurations to draw the target glyphs. We study the interplay between legibility, coherence and expressiveness, and show how our framework can be used in practice.