Meta’s New AI Tool Turns Custom Font Design Into a Simple Text Prompt Task

Meta has streamlined custom font creation, making it as accessible as drafting a short text prompt with its newest generative AI feature.

On March 27, the company launched a slate of new updates for its standalone Edits app, Meta’s dedicated platform for editing photos and short-form video. The headline addition is the “AI Style” tool for fonts, which lets users build fully unique custom text designs directly within the app.

The feature functions as a modern, AI-powered upgrade to Microsoft Word’s iconic WordArt tool, with the added flexibility of custom user prompts. It is a bit nested in the app’s editing workflow: the tool lives under the “Styles” tab, and creators can access it while editing text by tapping the “Restyle” icon, located between the standard text input and default font selection buttons.

To help users test the tool’s full capabilities, Meta includes a list of pre-built suggested prompts that demonstrate what the AI can create. While the design generates, a loading screen displays an animated plus-sign pattern. Simple pre-populated prompts like “flaming fire,” “3D rainbow,” and “overgrown cushion moss” all produce visuals that match their descriptions exactly, and even more detailed auto-populated prompts deliver results true to their specifications.

For example, tapping the pre-made “pop art” suggestion fills the prompt box with a detailed set of instructions: “pop art style font like something from a comic book, with posterized shading, bold colors, thick outlines, and big shapes break out of the letters and a burst in the background.” True to the prompt, the finished text looks like it was pulled straight from the pages of a printed comic book. Tapping the “forest” suggestion generates text styled to match its description: “twigs, leaves, and lots of white, purple, and yellow wildflowers blooming out of the letters.”

When users write their own custom prompts, results are often better than many expect, but the tool is not completely foolproof. The AI generator occasionally struggles to interpret even simple instructions, and often requires a few retries to produce the desired output. For the most consistent, high-quality results, Meta’s pre-set prompt options work best.

This new AI tool marks a major expansion of Meta’s built-in font and text styling options, a shift responding to the longstanding trend of creators relying on third-party design software and apps to customize content for Meta’s platforms. Back in 2020, Meta expanded the number of available fonts for Instagram Stories from just five to nine. Today, Instagram alone offers 14 default fonts, while the standalone Edits app comes with more than 200 pre-built font options even before accounting for this new AI-powered customization feature.