Human Writes; The Advent Of Type 2025; Hacking Adobe

Two font “hacks”, today, plus some free-ish fonts for your holiday stockings.

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TL;DR

(This is an LLM/GPT-generated summary of today’s Drop. We’re back to local Ollama and Qwen 3.)

• RFSL created the “Human Writes” invisible font to bypass Meta’s EU political‑ad ban by exploiting AI visual‑recognition gaps (https://humanwritesfont.com/)
• David Jones released the “Advent Of Type 2025” bundle of fourteen fonts on a pay‑what‑you‑want model (https://drj11.itch.io/advent-of-type-2025)
• Adobe Express Premium offers affordable access to 30,000 Adobe Fonts and millions of stock assets for $9.99 / mo (https://www.adobe.com/plans/acrobat.html)

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Human Writes

When Meta decided to block all political advertising in the EU last October, the Swedish LGBTQI rights organization RFSL found itself unable to promote messages about basic human rights on Facebook and Instagram. The ban stemmed from new EU transparency rules for political ads, but rather than comply with disclosure requirements, Meta chose to block everything it classified as political. That includes phrases like “support refugees” or “all trans people have the right to be heard.”

RFSL and the Swedish agency Stendahls responded with something wonderfully subversive: a typeface called Human Writes that looks perfectly normal to you and me but reads as gibberish to the “AI” systems Meta uses to screen ads. The font is built from carefully calibrated blocks of color and optical tricks that exploit the gap between how humans and machines interpret visual information. The team developed internal testing tools to send images through multiple language models, tweaking contrast and shape until they found the sweet spot where “AI” fails but human eyes succeed.

The project took a playful jab at Meta by using the company’s own examples of prohibited content as templates. Where Meta’s guidelines mentioned “knife crimes are increasing; how do we do something about the problem” as political speech, RFSL created “LGBTQI hatred is increasing; how do we do something about the problem” in their invisible font.

Anyone can type a message, generate an image, and use it in paid advertising. The campaign caught the attention of major news outlets and even Sweden’s Minister for Gender Equality. Thousands visited the site within days of launch, and RFSL’s message appeared on the very platforms trying to block it.

The font bypasses Meta’s terms of service rather than any actual law, so using it carries no legal risk beyond the possibility that Meta removes your ad. It is a creative workaround that highlights a real concern: when private companies make sweeping decisions about what counts as political, they end up silencing legitimate conversations about human rights.

I don’t use any Meta product/service, but I did try the image in Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini with a prompt “tell me about this image”. The first two times I asked Claude that prompt the chat broke. On the third try, it failed miserably, so I helped it out with a “so you can’t read the image?” prompt. It did a great deal of image processing and claimed it read “MR. STINKO IS NOT COOL” (I mean…fair…but not accurate). Gemini immediately said there was hidde text which was “THE TEST RESULT”. ChatGPT spun in a “thought” loop (without an answer) but when I inspected the “thinking” text sequence, it did in fact decode it (though it did a great deal of image processing to do so). There’s no way Meta can afford to put this much power and delay into a advert approval process, so this technique will have legs for at least a little while longer.

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The Advent Of Type 2025

David Jones (@drj@typo.social) is a typographer and proprietor of the CubicType foundry. He began a project dubbed “Advent of Type 2025” which offers up some of his collection in a “name your price” mode. There are fourteen total typefaces in the bundle and the suggested minimum price was $14.00 USD (an offer I immediately acted upon).

You can see examples of all the fonts at the above URL, and the section header was set in “Snowmouse”.

All the fonts in the bundle are licensed for personal use (you can contact David for commercial use options), and this is a neat/innovative way for folks like David to promote one’s work and for folks like us to support artists/designers.

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Hacking Adobe

After years of paying the “Adobe tax”, I switced to the Affinity suite and never looked back. While I am a tad concerned about the new Canva Affinity freemium-ish release, the old apps still work on my Mac, and will hopefully endure a few more OS updates (and, Affinity just gave v1/v2 owners a boatload of free fonts, so it’s hard — for the moment — to complain too much).

Even with that free font dump, I still miss the massive Adobe font collection I make solid use of.

However, you don’t need to pay a gigantic tax for the Adobe suite tax to access them.

If you head here and look for “Adobe Express Premium”, you can get access to:

• 30,000 fonts from the Adobe Fonts collection
• over 200 million royalty-free Adobe Stock assets, including photos, videos, and more
• pro editing tools like Remove Video Background and advanced animation
• Adobe Express on web and mobile
• access to all premium templates

for US$9.99/mo ($99.99/yr).

It’s still funding Adobe, so this option won’t be for everyone. But, if the access to Adobe resources has been the thing holding you back from ditching them, this might be a nice leg up on helping you eject from their expensive ecosystem.

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FIN

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