Typolis is a fun concept exploration for type-geeks. Nowadays, plenty of fonts are available worldwide in digital format: they are easy to find and use, as well as the related information (author, date, classification, etc.). Painted urban signs, however, precede the era of digitalisation: in most cases they were hand-crafted by unknown artisans, who sometimes used pre-existing fonts as reference but often resulted into creating unique letterforms. What if these beautiful "unintentional" pieces of type design became actual fonts available for everybody? I imagined/dreamed of an AI application that by scanning an analog sign in any city in the world, can "guess" and generate an entire digital font based on the existing glyphs. The AI generated font will be open source and free to download. Detected signs are also mapped for easy retrieval.
