A typeface is becoming the Comic Sans of the AI era. Not because it's poorly designed — but because it's everywhere, and nobody chose it.
That's the part that should bother us.
What happened
A font has gone from relative obscurity to ubiquity by becoming the default face of AI-generated content. It shows up across AI tools, AI marketing, AI outputs — to the point where it's now visual shorthand for "this was made by a machine." Designers are pushing back, calling it loud and obnoxious. But the real issue isn't whether the typeface is good or bad. It's that AI's visual identity is forming through repetition and defaults rather than deliberate design choices.
Meanwhile, a very different approach to aesthetics surfaced from the game design world. The art team behind Jonathan Blow's latest project — a puzzle game with over a thousand levels — revealed how they balanced visual richness with functional clarity. Drawing on influences from Disney and Studio Ghibli, they treated readability as the foundation, not a constraint. Every aesthetic choice had to earn its place by serving the player's ability to actually parse what was on screen.
Two stories. Two completely opposite relationships with visual decision-making.
The default is the design
Here's what's interesting about the AI font backlash: nobody sat down and decided this typeface should represent artificial intelligence. No brand guidelines were written. No creative director signed it off. It just… happened. Through defaults baked into tools, through the volume of AI-generated content flooding the internet, through the compounding effect of every AI startup reaching for whatever felt "techy" and "friendly" at the same time.
And now it's a signifier. When people see this font, they don't think about its letterforms — they think "AI." The typeface has acquired meaning that no one designed into it.
This is a pattern we should be paying attention to. AI tools are making aesthetic decisions at scale, and those decisions are creating cultural associations whether we like it or not. The homogenisation isn't just about everything looking the same — it's about certain visual choices becoming coded with meaning that designers didn't intend and can't easily override.
Compare this with the game team's approach. They didn't let their influences simply wash over the work. They used those references as raw material, then filtered every visual decision through a functional question: can the player read this? That's what intentional aesthetic work looks like. Every choice is a choice, not a default.
Why this matters beyond fonts
The font controversy is a symptom of something bigger. AI tools don't just generate content — they generate aesthetics. And those aesthetics are becoming the water we swim in.
Think about it. AI image generators have their own look — that slightly too-smooth, slightly too-saturated quality you can spot at a glance. AI-written copy has its cadences. AI-generated layouts have their patterns. None of these were designed. They're artefacts of training data, model architecture, and whatever defaults the tool's engineers happened to ship.
For designers, this creates a genuinely new problem. We're used to fighting for intentional choices against client preferences, brand guidelines, or technical constraints. Now we also need to fight against the gravitational pull of AI's accidental aesthetic. Because if you don't actively override the defaults, you're not making design decisions — the model is making them for you.
And organisations aren't helping. Most companies are stumbling into AI adoption with the same siloed thinking and lack of cultural readiness that plagued digital transformation a decade ago. Nobody's asking "what should our AI-generated content look like?" because nobody's even figured out who owns that question.
So what do we actually do?
The game team's approach offers a useful framework, even if you've never touched a game engine. They started with a functional foundation — readability — and built aesthetic choices on top of it. Style served clarity, not the other way around.
We can apply the same thinking to AI outputs. Before you ship anything that an AI tool helped create, ask yourself: did I choose this, or did the tool choose it for me? That applies to the typeface, the colour palette, the layout, the tone of the copy — all of it.
The designers who'll do the best work in the next few years won't be the ones who use AI the most. They'll be the ones who override AI's defaults the most deliberately.
Takeaway
Audit one AI-generated output this week — an image, a layout, a draft, whatever you've recently used a tool to produce. Identify three aesthetic choices the tool made that you didn't consciously decide on. Then ask whether you'd actually choose them yourself.
That gap between "what the tool gave you" and "what you'd intentionally design" is where your craft lives now.