Beatriz Lozano is a designer and educator who focuses on integrating new technologies such as creative coding and augmented reality into visual storytelling. Throughout the discussion, Beatriz shares insights about her work with typography, her creative processes, and her thoughts on the impact of generative AI on the design world. She emphasizes the importance of collaboration, experimentation, and the need for a multilingual approach in design.
Hi Beatriz. So, can you please briefly introduce yourself in your practice?
Hi, I'm Beatriz Lozano. I'm a designer and educator, primarily focused on new technology and how we can incorporate things like creative coding or augmented reality into visual storytelling, whether that's through branding or different types of projects.
And you work a lot with type in your work. Could you share a bit about that?
Yeah, for me, it happened gradually. I've always loved type, but when I first moved to New York around 2017, I became very interested in designing typefaces. Through that process, as someone who enjoys coding and animation, I started noticing overlaps in how we can make typography more interactive or reactive through different inputs, which I found exciting. Even just designing a variable font was really fun to try out.
You work quite interdisciplinarily, doing a lot of AR and VR as well as branding. What would you say is a common denominator in the different projects you do?
For me, it's always centered around typography. It's the first thing I think about when working on a project, whether custom drawing it or selecting typefaces. Typography is key, closely followed by motion.
You also mentioned that you do lettering and sometimes release actual typefaces. What does that process look like?
Sometimes they're connected. Sometimes my typeface, like Java Sans or others, starts off as lettering pieces. For me, it's a way to experiment with what works or what I find interesting. If I see potential, I start thinking about it from a systems perspective, refining the key letters, and then building out entire character sets. Then, I design it with a fitting tool, like Glyphs, to create a functional typeface. All of this comes from an initial point of curiosity, allowing me to grow and create something more functional.
How long does the process of completing a typeface take on average?
It doesn't take me that long compared to other people. It may take a year or less; that's mainly because I focus on display typefaces. I'm not really interested in designing highly legible text-based typefaces and perfecting the kerning. I'm much more interested in pushing the concept of a typeface.
For example, my typeface Ancho is all uppercase and very geometric. It's super easy to draw compared to other typefaces. That one took around a year, but probably a little less.
Nice, that's quite quick! Sometimes in your work, I've seen tools that are part of a process or even a form of presentation. How do you develop your own tools? What does that look like?
I really loved learning more about p5.js these last few years. For me, p5.js has opened a lot of doors in thinking about interactive typefaces and lettering. That's what led me to create my ‘Java Sans’ tool. That idea came from the 36 Days of Type project where I was making one letter every day. Now, it's not that difficult to explain, especially in p5.js. You just have to add the remaining characters. Even for that project, my process was very much dictated by Glyphs. Being a generalist, I'm not a great coder or the best type designer, so I'm more interested in the intersection of these fields to find interesting moments.
For that typeface, I went back into glyphs and drew an entire character set that was very thin, almost monolinear. I saw in your presentation that you didn't even do that. You just coded it in a way that already did that for you. I thought that was so smart and wished I had thought of it. Manually drawing all these monolinear skeleton structures for the typeface was really tedious.
There are so many ways to find a solution for an interactive lettering typeface. I assumed I needed to jump into Glyphs right away, but clearly, that's not true. You can do it without Glyphs, which is one thing I really love about these tools.
That's really nice. One thing I remember from the computational typography lunch lectures that really stuck with me was when you said we need to think about designing typefaces that adapt to their environment. How do you approach that in your work? Besides using tools, are there other ways you achieve this?
One thing I've been experimenting with is lettering and augmented reality, specifically how it can react to inputs like audio, which really interests me. I'm exploring how the shapes of letters can change in form or color. Right now, I'm focused on the artistic expression of it, but I believe the same logic can be applied from a functional and accessibility perspective.
For example, in AR, VR, or even online with variable or reactive fonts, the type can change in color or form, like switching from text to a display typeface depending on the size or how far the viewer is from reading it. I think there are many possibilities for typography to exist in our world.
Has the way you work changed a lot in the past two and a half years with the rise of generative AI and large language models?
It hasn't changed much for me yet because I've been very hesitant to use AI. In the future, I think I will start using APIs and exploring more with them. Sometimes, I feel conflicted about authorship and people not being able to give consent for their knowledge or work being trained on. For some of my AR or creative coding, especially in AR, if I'm working on Swift or some language I'm not super familiar with, I find tools like ChatGPT very helpful. If my code isn't working as I envisioned, I can copy and paste it and ask for help to refine it or understand why it's not working. This helps me learn how to fix it. That's the extent to which I've been incorporating AI into my workflow.
You bring up some important points, like the worries you have about these technologies. How does the emergence of these models and companies in the past two years make you feel about your work?
I'm definitely struggling with it right now. I feel very conflicted, especially with the new studies showing the immense impact AI is having on our environment and world. Here in New York, we're having a super hot summer. It's really unpleasant to be outside, and it feels like this will be our future forever. It makes me very sad to think about how reckless we are with these tools.
Sometimes, with all kinds of artwork, it's hard for me to justify doing something simply because it's fun, expressive, or creative without a true functional output. For example, if somebody's using AI for medical reasons or helping solve large-scale world issues, that seems more justifiable to me than making fun interactive typography. That's something I'm currently grappling with.
I think it's important to hold larger companies accountable, bring up these points and concerns, and ask for more transparency about data usage and the impacts their companies are having.
Do you think there's a way to push back against big AI companies as creatives and change the scene?
I think with all forms of social movements or organizing, you need to gather enough people to have a large impact. It's a matter of mobilizing. There's a great group called No Tech for Apartheid. They have workers at Google and other places, and they're doing amazing work raising awareness and consciousness. I think if they had a larger number, we would see quicker results.
I recently read that Google had a certain contract, and now they completely scrapped it. That contract is no longer happening. Whether they admit it or not, groups like No Tech for Apartheid are having a big impact on social awareness and pressuring companies to consider people's viewpoints more.
Yeah, that sounds really important and meaningful. Those groups can definitely make an impact. What I'm wondering is, what can makers do? Is there a way for creatives to help with this? When you mention organization, how does it translate to daily practice?
For sure. A big part of this is the tools we use. Last semester, I put together a five-week workshop for my students at Parsons, where we worked with AR and 3D scanning. I've also done different workshops in Mexico, which has given me a new perspective. In Puebla, for example, we barely had internet access, and people sometimes had very old phones. But we were still able to get the designs to work.
Currently, I'm using an iPhone 12 that's all cracked and relatively old. But it still works, and I'm able to design with it. You don't need to buy every new iPhone or feature to be a digital creator or work with AR. Being more intentional with the tools we use is one way to go about it.
Sharing knowledge is already huge in the world of open-source and creative coding. Why make someone start from scratch when there's already a database of knowledge? This not only saves energy and time but helps us all advance together. It's about moving away from individual ownership of ideas and adopting a more open-source approach.
That would be really cool. I would love that. I'm curious about how it would work, but I think it sounds great and interesting.
On another note: do you have a remedy for when you feel stuck or have a creative block?
Yeah, I think a big part of my process is just experimentation and exploration. That's why I really love tools like p5.js. Even in more static tools like Cinema4D, where there are a lot of inputs you can change, I enjoy starting with something that already works on a very simple type treatment. Then, I dive in and mess it up by applying different effects or changing the code, almost to the point of breaking it, until something interesting happens. For example, "Oh, that's really cool, the way it changes color here, the way it twists there."
I often save these experiments in folders or on my p5.js account. In the future, these are really helpful references for me. If I'm stuck, I can revisit all these wacky little experiments and think, "Oh, maybe that can be improved upon or repurposed for this specific use case." So while playing, I am actually building a database of knowledge for your own practice to work from.
What tools do you wish existed that would really help you in your practice?
I think more and more, I see the need for a multilingual approach and ways for us to collaborate, especially from a scriptural and typographic perspective. With globalization, we need to find ways to quickly translate our designs to reach a broader audience. For example, when designing a website and needing to redesign it for something like Arabic, it's a complete shift because of how the text is read and the ligatures are connected. I can imagine trying to do that in an AR space: creating interactive, augmented reality letters that can quickly shift between very different scripts.
In the future, I would love to see more experimentation in AR and better language support. These are two areas I'd like to explore more.
