Since Flux is an open model available for download and fine-tuning, this past month has been the first time training a typeface LoRA might make sense. That’s exactly what an AI enthusiast named Vadim Fedenko (who did not respond to a request for an interview by press time) discovered recently. “I’m really impressed by how this turned out,” Fedenko wrote in a Reddit post. “Flux picks up how letters look in a particular style/font, making it possible to train Loras with specific Fonts, Typefaces, etc. Going to train more of those soon.”
An example of the first Flux typeface LoRA, Y2K.
An example of the first Flux typeface LoRA, Y2K.
An example of the Y2K LoRA.
An example of the Y2K LoRA.
An example of the Y2K LoRA.
An example of the Y2K LoRA.
An example of the Y2K LoRA.
An example of the Y2K LoRA.
For his first experiment, Fedenko chose a bubbly “Y2K” style font reminiscent of those popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, publishing the resulting model on the Civitai platform on August 20. Two days later, a Civitai user named “AggravatingScree7189” posted a second typeface LoRA that reproduces a font similar to one found in the Cyberpunk 2077 video game.
“Text was so bad before it never occurred to me that you could do this,” wrote a Reddit user named eggs-benedryl when reacting to Fedenko’s post on the Y2K font. Another Redditor wrote, “I didn’t know the Y2K journal was fake until I zoomed it.”
Is it overkill?
An example of the Cyberpunk 2077 LoRA, rendered with Flux dev.
An example of the Cyberpunk 2077 LoRA, rendered with Flux dev.
It’s true that using a deeply trained image synthesis neural network to render a plain old font on a simple background is probably overkill. You likely wouldn’t want to use this method to replace Adobe Illustrator while designing a document.
“This looks good but it’s kinda funny how we’re reinventing the idea of fonts as 300MB LoRAs,” wrote one Reddit commenter on a thread about the Cyberpunk 2077 font.
Generative AI is often criticized for its environmental impact, and it’s a valid concern for massive cloud data centers. But we find that Flux can insert these fonts into AI-generated scenes while running locally on an RTX 3060 in a quantized (size-reduced) form (and the full dev model can run on an RTX 3090). It’s similar electricity consumption to playing a video game on the same PC. The same goes for LoRA creation: The creator of the Cyberpunk 2077 font module for Flux trained the LoRA in three hours on a 3090 GPU.
There are also ethical issues with using AI image generators, such as how they are trained on harvested data without content owner consent. Even though the technology is divisive among some artists, a large community of people use it every day and share the results online through social media platforms like Reddit, which leads to new applications of the technology like this one.
As of this writing, there are only two custom Flux typeface LoRAs, but we’ve already heard plans of people creating more as we write this. While it’s still in its earliest stages, the technique of creating typeface LoRAs may become foundational if AI image synthesis becomes more widely deployed in the future. Adobe, with its own image synthesis models, is likely watching.
