# Those AI posters, with real fonts > Source: > Published: 2026-09-23 00:00:00+00:00 # Those AI posters, with real fonts Those [hundred poster prompts](https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/) again. A common observation is that it’s not using real fonts. An AI image model makes a bitmap image of what it thinks a poster should look like. That has image has shapes that resemble letters, spelling out words. But unlike the words you’re reading out now, those shapes aren’t built from a library of letter shapes (or more precisely, strict recipes for producing shapes) called a font. It’s as if the image model is hand-drawing each letter from its memory of what that kind of typeface looks like. Sometimes that’s obviously appropriate. Psychedelic Sixties and Push Pin Studios clearly rely on letter forms that a real designer would hand-draw. Other times it appears more likely that a real font would be the correct choice. Swiss / International Typographic Style would almost certainly use Helvetica, Contemporary Editorial looks like a mainstream serif font like Times Roman. In this case are we only using the model’s approximation because it doesn’t have another way? A designer friend observes: “I don’t recognise any of the fonts, they’re all approximations. One previously unseen font on a poster I could accept, but 2-3 when they’re all fairly bland in any case still registers as a tell for me.” As I’ve pointed out before, I don’t care about tells: fooling people that they’re not looking at AI is not a goal. But not triggering icky feelings, *is* a goal. If some people are getting an uncanny-valley response because that’s not quite Helvetica, this is a problem. (Notwithstanding, the same people get not-quite-Helvetica ick from Arial). So I thought I’d experiment by trying to convert some posters into a vector format. Cut out the graphical elements, find a font that matches the text, and reassemble it into an SVG file. [The story of how that went, and all the results, is on its own page](https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/svg.html). When it works, you get pretty close matches, and the knowledge that the type is as a type designer intended. Here’s the De Stijl gig, before and after: So that’s better, right? Maybe sometimes, maybe not always, I’m not sure. Look at the Bauhaus / Modernist gig, below. That pointy ‘V’ the model drew works really well for me. Perhaps if my convertor had found the right font, the conversion would have a pointy V too. But that might not match other letters. And anyway, the point is that the AI model is free to decide that here, in this one word, in this one position, a pointy V works. In other places, like the Festival of Britain gig below, the model-generated drawn text lines up just-so: “CARVER &” the same width as “THE FLOOD”. You can achieve this with type by stretching or adjusting whitespace, but the model has achieved it in its drawing with quite a sophisticated combination of both: drawing and spacing all the letters so that in combination they fit the space. And on that theme: one of the reasons to use fonts with a real text layout engine, is that the layout engine knows how to space letters just-so. And that’s especially ideal when you’re typesetting blocks of text. But I’ve been learning that especially with big titles and logos, [it’s not unusual for a designer to nudge things around](https://john.hartnup.uk/kerning-by-eye/). You don’t get that for free. The AI model has the freedom to: - invent letter forms that deviate from what the “font” would normally use - use different weights, widths, spacings, shapes according to context and space needs … indeed it has no concept of *not* doing those things. So myself, I’ve become quite attached to letting the model do this. A model with suitable training could become very, very good at it – I’m just using general purpose models, though. Who knows whether OpenAI are training an image model in that direction? I should mention the other reason to build posters in a vector format: editability. If you have a poster in a combination of bitmap objects and vector elements, you can move things around, add or change words, and so on. That is not the focus of this blog post. As ever, I am not a professional designer, nor even a well trained amateur. I can only speak for my own untrained eye.