Embedding Every Font with Neural Networks Yields a Flower-Shaped Map of Google Fonts
Chroma-Crash · reddit · 2026-10-06
A developer building a font-search tool for the past year pre-trains neural networks to embed each glyph, then post-trains for search. The pre-trained embeddings turned out to be the most interesting artifact: squashing them with t-SNE (beating PCA and UMAP) into XYZ coordinates and RGB color reveals clusters of visually similar fonts.
The Google Fonts corpus visualization unexpectedly resembles a flower, with most cursive fonts landing in the stamen. It's explorable at font-search.com/map, with code open-sourced as dylan-berndt/Briefcase on GitHub.
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