AI can now generate photographs you can’t distinguish from real ones. Illustrations that look hand-drawn. But ask it to design a typeface and you get garbage. Type design remains one of the few disciplines where the human hand is still obvious, and that gap is about to matter a lot more than people think.

Design provocateur Jessica Walsh, writing for Creative Boom, makes the case that typography is becoming the last credible signal of human craft. The piece comes from a branding perspective, and the diagnosis of the current type market is sharp:

A lot of type foundries understandably focus on mass-market needs: ultra-neutral workhorse sans serifs, or fonts that are basically just a slightly warmer, narrower, rounder, or “friendlier” cousin of something that already exists. These fonts do their job. They’re flexible. They’re safe. They sell well. But safety isn’t what builds distinction.

That’s been true for a while. What’s changing is the AI layer on top. When every brand has access to the same generators and stock libraries, the visual output converges fast. Walsh argues this makes human typography more valuable:

We’re entering an era where people will crave proof of human craft more than ever, because they literally won’t be able to trust what they’re seeing.

And the punchline:

Custom typography is about to become one of the most powerful ways for brands to signal: a human made this.

Typography was always the quiet differentiator in branding. Most people can’t name the typeface on their favorite brand, but they’d notice if it changed. AI just turned that quiet differentiator into a loud one. Worth a full read if you work in brand design.