AI Isn't Killing Typography—It's Exposing How We Stopped Caring About Being Addressed

There is a particular kind of intimacy in handwriting a friend's name. The slope of the letters, the loop you give the y, whether your t leans forward like it's eager or stands upright like it's been to finishing school, these are small declarations of feeling. Typography, when you look at it closely, has always been a love language. We stopped calling it that around the time we started typing.I have been thinking about this since Monotype quietly released Gotham Variable in May, the kind of design event that does not trend but probably should. Gotham, for the uninitiated, is the typeface primarily designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000, drawn from the muscular vernacular signage of New York City, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the cornerstones of mid-century civic buildings, the kind of lettering applied by people who were not thinking about brand identity. Someone rescued it from anonymity and gave it a name, and then it became, somehow, the official face of the early twenty-first…