Typography City 2024
This research has been published by Nature Scientific Reports.
In rethinking art and architecture theory and criticism through Visual AI, urban architecture or street styles, as static data, may remain stable over long periods, making it difficult to analyze them alongside dynamic cultural and social factors. While signage style data on buildings can quickly adapt to changes in fashion, cultural trends, and consumer aesthetic preferences, providing timely signals of the city's cultural shifts that we can capture. In specific, the typographic characteristics, color composition, and dimensional proportions of the signage, as critical elements of urban design and communication, could reflect cultural, historical, and social influences in a more interpretable dimension at the micro-level.
By using Visual AI for style analysis, we can examine signage characteristics in urban contexts to uncover how design style reflect and influence cultural, social, and economic factors. We analyze the relationship between 11 typefaces and the average household income in 77 wards of London. The result show that the typefaces used in the neighborhood are highly correlated with economic and demographic factors. Typeface could be an alternative metric to evaluate economic and demographic status in large-scale urban regions. More generally, typeface can also act as a key visual characteristic of a city. After plotting all the retrieved typefaces from shop signage onto their respective local buildings, complete with corresponding typefaces and colors, we uncovered numerous patterns from the map.
Correlation coefficients between typefaces and amenity categories. The x-, y-axis refer to the typeface types and amenities categories, respectively. The value represents the corresponding correlation coefficient between a pair of typeface and amenity category.