I realize that continually posting cool Adobe projects here can quickly come to look quite unseemly, but I can’t resist with this video, recorded at last week’s Adobe MAX conference. In it, Adobe developer evangelist Lee Brimelow demonstrates “Project Faces,” an iPad app that allows users to create bespoke typefaces on the fly just by manipulating a handful of parameter sliders. The screen grab of the app at the top of this post shows how simple the interface is to master, and in the video below you can see how quickly Brimelow is able to generate a completely new font and even export it for immediate use in Adobe Illustrator.
Professional type designers will have plenty of legitimate objections to whether this is really quality type design or not, but the sheer power on display here—the acute understanding of typeface mechanics combined with deeply informed engineering expertise—is amazing, and the democratizing spirit is thrilling, to boot. It’s another example of one of those things that, for me, fall under the heading “Only Adobe can do this.”
No more posts about my employer tomorrow, I promise.
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