Using Autoencoders to Generate Skeleton-Based Typography

Abstract

Type Design is a domain that multiple times has profited from the emergence of new tools and technologies. The transformation of type from physical to digital, the dissemination of font design software and the adoption of web typography make type design better known and more accessible. This domain has received an even greater push with the increasing adoption of generative tools to create more diverse and experimental fonts. Nowadays, with the application of Machine Learning to various domains, typography has also been influenced by it. In this work, we produce a dataset by extracting letter skeletons from a collection of existing fonts. Then we trained a Variational Autoencoder and a Sketch Decoder to learn to create these skeletons that can be used to generate new ones by exploring the latent space. This process also allows us to control the style of the resulting skeletons and interpolate between different characters. Finally, we developed new glyphs by filling the generated skeletons based on the original letters’ stroke width and showing some applications of the results.