51³Ô¹Ï

51³Ô¹Ï Memorial Gallery presents a special two part exhibition on view September 8 - November 14, 2025. A special lecture will take place with exhibiting designers on Thursday, October 9 from 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM in Campus Ballroom A with a reception later that day in Hale Hall from 5:00 - 7:00 PM. 

As photography reshaped the meaning of painting in the late 19th century, artificial intelligence is now redefining the landscape of graphic design. Font Flow: Typographic Experimentation in the Age of AI explores the evolving relationship between human creativity and machine-generated design through the material language of typography.
 
In this section of the exhibition, four typographers engage in a direct challenge with AI, responding to randomized prompts for hypothetical university lectures. Each prompt imposes formal and material constraints—pairing specific artistic or historical influences with typographic choices randomly selected from the Font Flow platform. Designers have 90 minutes to create and submit their work before the same prompt is processed by a large language model (LLM), which generates its own design interpretation. The resulting human- and AI-made posters appear side by side in the Font Flow gallery, stripped of attribution, leaving viewers to discern which is which.
 
This exhibition brings the digital experiment into physical space, inviting visitors to confront their assumptions about authorship, creativity, and the future of design. The act of distinguishing human from AI work becomes a meditation on intelligence, intuition, and the essence of typographic excellence in a post-AI world.
 

As AI continues to shape the future of typography, one vital area of ongoing research is the design of fonts and typesetting systems that support better reading performance. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), two out of five U.S. schoolchildren are not proficient readers—a status that often persists into adulthood.
 
This aspect of the exhibition showcases design interventions at multiple scales: from typefaces that support handwriting development to paragraph-level typesetting that enhances reading comprehension. The range of approaches on display that despite advances in AI, human creativity remains a powerful force in shaping how we read.