Letter Spirit: A Model of Visual Creativity

The Letter Spirit program is a model of human creativity in the domain of typeface design. Creativity is involved in most human activities, but it is by its nonquantifiable nature at odds with many modeling approaches. The Letter Spirit program models the inherently creative task of typeface design with a two-level approach. The top level loop coordinates three modules that create letterforms, evaluate them aesthetically, and decide which letterforms need to be re-designed, until all 26 lowercase letters have been rendered suitably. On the lower level, each module carries out its task by modeling the way that subcognitive pressures combine and conflict to produce emergent behavior on the cognitive level. While certain types of reasoning can be modeled with the manipulation of symbols whose meaning is considered to be absolutely fixed, this work helps to illustrate why it is difficult to demonstrate creative behavior with systems of that kind.