SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA — AI companies including Anthropic, Runway, Perplexity, and Manus have adopted serif typefaces in their user interfaces and branding. This shift toward serif fonts aims to project warmth and personality to counter public perceptions of AI being cold.
Keya Vadgama, a writer and type practitioner in the San Francisco Bay Area, characterized this trend as the serif renaissance in a Substack newsletter. "It's not that difficult to discern why AI-native companies in particular are being drawn to serif fonts: AI is inherently cold and without opinion," Vadgama wrote.
Perplexity Chief Communications Officer Jesse Dwyer said their company uses human design because "Why wouldn't we have human design? Perplexity is for people." Anthropic's Claude AI model uses serif fonts by default. "Claude is interesting. It's using this slightly brown background to mirror a book page. It's sort of emulating the feeling of reading print," said Ali S. Qadeer, chair of graphic design at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.
Qadeer added that in the broader public, a serif typeface carries connotations of scholarship. Qadeer attributed the trend to a response to social criticism. "I 100 percent believe it's an effort to soften people up. It is a response to large-scale social criticism. The sterile look of tech that has dominated for the past 20 years has increasingly negative connotations," he said.
Vadgama also mentioned the origin of serifs. They have an origin in calligraphy, which connotes a human and fluid way of making letterforms. However, Vadgama stated that using serifs to signal a company is not "scary" might be somewhat misleading. "I do think there's something a little dishonest in trying to use serifs to signal 'We're not one of those scary AI companies,' when in reality, you still are. You can use Comic Sans, if you wanted. It doesn't stop you from still being an AI company," she said.