Double Vision: A Creative Dance of Typography & AI

by | Sunday, January 26, 2025

I love playing with type and words. Recently I got obsessed with creating a particular kind of typographic design—layouts where letters in words do double duty. A simple example is given below: “THINK INFINITY” where the shared letters “IN” span both the words.

Nothing profound, as design ideas go – but they are little visual puzzles that are quite fun to create. The best part is finding the right set of words or a phrase that evoke some deeper meaning.

As I started creating these designs I would often turn to Claude.AI to offer suggestions for phrases or ideas I could play with. Not all its suggestions work, but there were enough nuggets to play with, that I have generated dozens of such designs over the past few weeks. After creating a design I often share it back with Claude for its response—just to see whether it “get it.” Claude sometimes would surprise me with its interpretations so I decided to take a step further.

I started asking Claude to respond to my designs through prose poetry – not to describe the visual elements but to capture their deeper resonance in words. It took a bit of pushing and prodding when responses felt flat or obvious. “Too descriptive.” “Try again.” “That ending doesn’t work.” I often edited the responses to make them work better. Through these cycles of promoting and refinement, something interesting emerged: my designs exploring visual meaning, Claude’s responses creating verbal echoes – algorithmic yet sometimes striking.

Here are some paired conversations between human design and machine poetry… Enjoy!


The Planets


Semantics / Syntactics


Emotions


Atoms and the Void


Yesterday / Today / Tomorrow


Temperamental


On being and becoming


It’s a Turvy/Topsy world


The presence of absence


Origin/Journey/Destination/Return


Simplicity/Complexity


From data to wisdom


Fat/Slim Chance


Mindful/less/ness


Blank Slate


Topics related to this post: Aesthetics | AI | Art | Creativity | Design | Fun | Identity | Learning | Personal | Philosophy | Poetry | Worth Reading

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