Meta’s new AI tool turns anyone into a type designer

Meta is making font design as easy as writing a prompt with its newest AI tool.

On March 27, the company rolled out new features within its stand-alone Edits app for editing photos and short-form video, including “AI Style” for fonts, which lets users customize text themselves. It’s like a modern-day version of the classic WordArt style in Microsoft Word, but with AI text prompts.

The feature is a bit tucked away within the “Styles” tab, but users can find it when editing text by tapping the “Restyle” icon between the icons to write and choose a font. A list of suggested prompts shows what’s possible. The loading screen shows an animated plus-sign pattern.

Suggestions that auto-populate the prompt box with terms like “flaming fire,” “3d rainbow,” and “overgrown cushion moss” show up visually as promised, while other, more detailed auto-prompts are also true to form.

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Tapping a “pop art” suggestion fills the prompt box with more detailed instructions that read, “pop art style font like something from a comic book, with posterized shading, bold colors, thick outlines, and big shapes break out of the letters and a burst in the background.” Sure enough, the text ends up looking like something out of a comic book. Tapping “forest” produces a text style based on the prompt “twigs, leaves, and lots of white, purple, and yellow wildflowers blooming out of the letters.”

When writing your own prompt, the output is better than you might expect, but it’s not foolproof. Sometimes the generator has a hard time understanding simple instructions and takes a few tries. The preset options work best.

Meta has added significantly to its fonts and text style options over the years as creators turned to third-party design software and apps to customize their content. In 2020, it expanded its number of available fonts in Instagram Stories from five to nine. Currently there are 14 fonts on Instagram alone, while the Edits app has more than 200.

Even if it’s not perfect, AI Style for fonts increases the amount of text customization available to creators, and it also shows how far AI has come. As it’s gotten better at rendering realistic-looking hands, AI has also improved at creating legible typography.

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