Monday, September 14, 2015

Kinetic Type

In today’s society, new ideas and technology are growing. We need to advance ourselves within this changing environment by not only creating new things, but also by inventing new ways to present them. We need new presentation venues to keep us entertained. Showing and using the same PowerPoint for class or clients presentations is outdated and boring. Thankfully, as Graphic Designers, we understand that we need to come up with new ways to present these ideas and to keep the consumers' attention a little longer.



Our idea was Kinetic Typography by using animation and audio with type.  It will help emphasize whatever message the designer is trying to convey. You may have seen Kinetic Typography before in commercials, websites and movies. The use of Kinetic Typography is very appealing and popular amongst both clients and designers. Watching a Kinetic Typography video is a lot more compelling than stationary text, seeing the movable text interact with the viewer as words swipe by is a vastly more effective way of conveying emotions and thoughts. The difference between kinetic typography to static is that kinetic has the ability to add significant emotive content and expression. Kinetic has been a successful case because the attention it brings in reading performance and comprehension. For example the motion in films indicates a time-based presentation of text can be used effectively to capture the audiences attentions better. We need to keep using kinetic typography because it will overall increase everyone’s reading performance.


The engine behind kinetic typography is the animation that is developed specifically for the purpose of developing kinetic typography. The details of the engine are described in, "The Kinetic Typography Engine: An Extensible System for Animating Expressive Text".  This paper explains the low-level typographic manipulations and uses the animation framework to create the typographic structure to fit the needs of the work. It is shown to create simple behavior filters to create highly complex animations very easily. The future work of the animation engine is to heighten the use of kinetic typography in different way to find out and develop new design principles. 

The first use of Kinetic Typography was by George Melies a French filmmaker in 1899, but it was not the Kinetic Typography we know today.  It was similar to the idea of moving type to communicate a message. Melies was the first to kind of create a stop-motion effect in film, leading him to create fantasy driven stories seen to be an impossible creation in his time period. Melies stop-motion was an animated set of children’s toy alphabet blocks, which was seen as an illusion of objects moving around. Sadly, Melies destroyed all of his work and films before his death, the only thing left is copy of some of his work but the animation is not to be seen. An example of Melies work is the 1902 epic, A Trip to the Moon, which did not have much kinetic typography but it did show evidence that Melies was on the verge to introduce motion type. Another example is Saul Bass, a filmmaker and Graphic Designer who used Kinetic Typography in many Alfred Hitchcock films during the 1950's. In Bass’ own words: “ My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film’s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually bean, views would already have an emotional resonance with it.” Saul Bass basically defined and created the purpose of kinetic typography, every piece of work done by Bass is powerful punch of emotions which draws the audience in to not only understand what the film is about but wanting them to crave to know more. Bass’ technique was used in North by Northwestern in the opening scene and credits, to set up a feeling of suspense for movie pilots. 



Overall, the reason for Kinetic Typography is to use the motion type to grab the viewer’s attentions quicker and hold it longer. The use of "stationary type" will make the viewer miss the message compared to 

"kinetic". As technology increases, we need our viewers to stay engaged by using Kinetic Typography, because who knows what you will miss? 

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