Generating, Generative Typography

Chinatown.js Talk Submission

Below was my submission for the upcoming Chinatown.js session this week. I think it captures what I’ve been thinking about with my course coming up in the Spring. I was chosen to speak but unfortunately unable to accept. Sharing now so that I can reference and expand upon this later:

Generating, Generative Typography: Teaching coding in the era of personal software

How do we teach design thinking when our design tools have fundamentally changed?

For four years, I’ve taught Generative Typography through MICA, Cooper Union, and Letterform Archive. Then AI coding tools arrived and generated in a single prompt what used to take my students weeks to build.

This made me realize I’d been teaching it backwards. My students no longer need to spend weeks learning syntax before they can think about systems. We can spend more time learning how to create the system itself focusing on modular type and parametric design, using code as the medium to express these ideas.

So I rebuilt the course around a new premise: teach typography as a generative system first, then use AI to accelerate the code learning. This talk shares the process of rebuilding Generative Typography for this new era. It isn’t about replacing code with AI or defending code from AI, but finally being able to teach both the thinking and the making without one drowning out the other.

-Mello

P..S - The website is open-source and the submission process is run via Github issues: Issue #46