The Strange Agency

By feeding letterform images to Stable Diffusion, we can generate stylistic variations of fonts in a methodical manner. Here we experiment with controlling the amount of diffusion influence by both blurring the source images and by stepping through start_schedule values.

We can engineer the prompt a little better, adding text describing our desired letter, for example letter s. In our experiments, this helped maintain legibility with higher blur and start_schedule settings.

We also toyed with appending a sequence number to the prompt, as this would give us a slight variation between repeated letters, a far more subtle effect than changing the seed. A rough sketch of the script follows. Here we use the stability.ai API.

# engine="stable-diffusion-v1-5"

seed = 4
prompt = 'raygun glitch the designers republic graphic design'

for radius in [0, 5, 10, 15, 25]:
    for schedule in [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]:
        for c in text:

            # source images are gaussian blurred with the given radius
            source = prep_image(get_char(c), radius)

            # append letter name and numeric perturbation to prompt
            _prompt = f'{prompt} letter {c} {i}',

            answers = stability_api.generate(
                        prompt=_prompt,
                        init_image=source,
                        start_schedule=schedule/10,
                        seed=seed + retry,
                        steps=30,
                        cfg_scale=14.0,
                        width=size,
                        height=size,
                        sampler=generation.SAMPLER_K_DPMPP_2S_ANCESTRAL,
                    )

Letterform images were taken from this Kaggle Dataset.