With This Interactive Font Map, You Have No Excuse For Defaulting To Helvetica On Everything

When it comes to choosing fonts, most of us are pretty lazy. For normal stuff, we coast by using Helvetica or Times New Roman. If we're feeling fancy, we might throw a Gotham or a Futura in the mix. And sometimes, just for the heck of it, we might use Comic Sans to get a rise out of the people around us.

But when we have a particular style in mind, the hunt for the perfect font can be elusive and frustrating. (I'm looking for something a little bit like Open Sans, but with a hint of Rambla and the width of Fira Sans. Do you know of a font like that?) IDEO's Font Map, an interactive typography map built using an AI algorithm, however, makes the process of exploration and selection much easier for all of us. And it also opens our eyes to relationships across fonts that we've never realized were there before.

With Font Map, you can explore more than 750 fonts that have been sorted and mapped based on the visual characteristics they share with each other. The interactive map comes in especially handy for graphic designers who are looking for alternative fonts with a similar aesthetic or for regular users who want to experiment but are tired of scrolling through the alphabetically-organized selection of fonts on a Word or Pages document.

When you click on a certain font in Font Map, it not only shows you fonts similar to the one you've selected, but also leads you to the Google Font page where you can download the font. 

Kevin Ho, the designer of Font Map, writes that he was inspired to make this map after realizing how effective machine-learning technology had become at identifying and organizing visual information. Font Map is also a great example of how artificial intelligence is providing invaluable assistance to the process of graphic design nowadays.

So next time you feel like falling back into your old habits of using Helvetica, you can fiddle around with IDEO's Font Map, and you might actually end up falling in love with a font you've never even heard of. Play and you just might find your ideal type.

And for more word-related fun, check out an online voice simulator that you can use to speak (or just to produce really weird sounds).