Wednesday, 4 February 2009

Kinetic typography

Spent this afternoon looking at kinetic typography on YouTube.





I found this by typing 'typography' in the search field, and at first I was impressed, but then you see just how much of this style is on the website, and you get sick of it very quickly.

I did a search online to find out more about this style of type and there is actually a wikipedia page about it, including details of it's history.

It seems the first time this animated text was used was for the opening titles for Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film 'North by Northwest' which was designed by Saul Bass...



Bass used a similar style 2 years later for Hitchcock's 1960 film 'Psycho'



"Since then, the use of kinetic typography has become commonplace in film introductory titles and television advertisements. More recently, it has been a central feature of numerous television idents, notably Martin Lambie Nairn's first Channel 4 ident (UK)"



That was from 1982! I find it hard to compare with these kinetic typography pieces as I feel they show very little original thinking and style. But its interesting to see what fonts are used to express certain words, and it also shows understanding of design programs such as Adobe Flash or After Affects and the ability to apply text in such an unusual way. Students at CMU's School of Design have even created a dedicated Kinetic Typography Engine, which is used to teach kinetic typography techniques to students.

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