“Before, it showed that you cared to use the right punctuation marks, to make cool hover effects. It showed that you cared, to have cool illustrations. And now it does the exact opposite. It shows that you didn't care.”
Honest UX Talks · User Experience · November 2026
Context
Asked how AI affects typographic choices, Schöndörfer talks about the em dash now being read as a sign of AI-written text. He widens it: polish used to signal effort, and now it can signal the reverse.
Transcript
…I've learned about the Khrushchev, the Harche, and all these lovely, wonderful diacritics. But it is like just you have to make it work in that language, obviously. But there are so many beautiful typefaces that support all these diacritics. Why don't you make use of them? So it's like, yeah.
…make it slightly different or you do it yourself or you just pick from whatever AI is producing to you. How do you feel like AI is playing a role, especially to those designers who are not trained to understand the typographic choices today? Like what's the consequences and what we can do better?
Yeah, so we already talked about inter and inter is obviously was the most popular font even before all these agentic web designs or this generated AI stuff. It was already very popular back then and of course the thing that it is trained on is like these and there are several layers to that because when it comes to the font choice you can see it because it uses always free fonts. Why? Because of licensing. So I'm sure a monotype, monopoly type I'm calling them, like my fonts and all this, they invest in a way that they somehow are picked there because right now they're just left out because nobody cares because everything gets generated from Google fonts and because they're easy to fork and to use, which makes sense because of licensing. But the part of paid fonts is getting less and less relevant in a way. And everybody's using the same free fonts that everybody else is using. Then you have some interesting combinations. It loves to combine a very narrow italic with a bold sensor for headings. And…
100%.
I don't know what the question was. I got taken away.
No, but I mean, you capture a great answer. I was more focusing on where do we go from here, right? Like as designers, in terms of AI-generated typography, like I, as a designer, just to make it a bit more practical, I don't really want to, you know, take existing AI-generated, let's say, website…
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