Typographical Design in Motion

For over 20,000 years, humans have recorded their thoughts and experiences through written communication developed by cave drawings, pictograms, ideograms and phonograms. As time progressed, the Phoenicians developed the first true alphabet through a set of symbols, representing spoken sounds and spoken languages. The alphabet was further developed by the Greeks and refined by the Romans, creating several different styles of handwriting used for various purposes. By the fifteenth century less than one-tenth of the Europe population could read until Johann Gutenberg changed the course of the written word. Gutenburg took the practice of printing type and perfected a workable system of movable type allowing published works to be mass-produced and distributed throughout the World.

Recently, the concept of movable type has been taken into a whole new perspective of communication through kinetic type. Artist have further developed the original purpose of the alphabet and all three concepts (set of symbols, spoken sounds and spoken language) and combined them together, developing typographical design into motion.

Typography in Motion from ilovetypography.com on Vimeo.

Today, kinetic type has been incorporated into advertising, creating a dynamic and unique approach to the spoken message, reinforcing dialogue into text in motion, and combining it with animated graphic design.

I appreciate how the use of typography has gone into a whole new direction. This shows us that no matter what, reading text still has a significant purpose in our life. We can even get an average person, who contributes a good portion of their spare time to watching television, to read.
Incorporating typography into motion also can create a lasting affect on the viewer. In advertising, this can have a huge impact on the consumer, because not only are they listening to the advertisement, they are following along word by word, imbedding the dialogue into their memory. This also allows the viewer to understand what is being said, kind of like subtitles on a foreign movie. The cone of learning states that we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we hear and see, 70% of what we say and 90% of what we say and do. Looks like advertisement is catching up to our senses, soon they will be making us repeat what they say, along with some interpretive dancing. Talk about audience participation in your own home, as if getting us to read wasn’t enough.

Here is a Mercedes-Benz commercial that has an interesting approach to kinetic typography.