This project enhances the expressive ability of the fundamental medium of text with the development of tools that enhance the creativity of people while generating kinetic typography. Traditional forms of static typography can be augmented with time and motion, in order to manipulate the position, size, color, shape, and other properties of text displays over time. This new kinetic typography offers a number of potential advantages: the ability to convey emotional content and qualities of the speaker's voice, the potential for increased reading performance on very small displays, and the ability to communicate in new ways. These advantages have been largely unexploited because the technological tools needed to make kinetic typography easily accessible to both designers and the general public have only begun to be developed. This project explores the nature of tools that enhance human creativity in the context of generating kinetic text. The impact of this work will reach well beyond kinetic typography, with implications for understanding the design process, emotional communication, and creativity. This research will extend our basic knowledge of communication and information transfer, and give us a foundation for understanding and creating kinetic typography tools, with long-term implications for work in design schools and training environments.
Kinetic Typography Movable metal type was one of the greatest technological innovations of the last millennium – enabling a new form of expression (printed text) that could economically reach large numbers of people, thus dramatically changing communications. Application of this technology led first to a craft of typography, and eventually to a systematic study of principles for its effective use. Sound application of these principles can now substantially improve communication effectiveness. In the late 1800s, film began to emerge as a very different kind of expressive medium. Film would soon become a highly expressive medium that would take advantage of its own unique ability to tell stories, portray emotion, and capture our attention. Modern filmmakers have shown a remarkable ability to use this medium in powerful and evocative ways which writers working only in text are hard pressed to match. Kinetic typography refers to the art and technique of expression with animated text. With the advent of digital technology, text is no longer limited to static forms on a computer screen. Type can change color, size, and position over tie, adding significant emotional content and expression to text that we read on the screen. Kinetic typography has been widely and successfully used in film as well as in television and computer-based advertising. Perceptual psychology research on attention, reading performance, and comprehension has indicated that time-based presentation of text can be used effectively to capture and manipulate a viewer’s attention and in some cases improve overall reading performance. We consider kinetic typography to be a vehicle for adding some of the properties of film to that of text. For example, kinetic typography can be effective in conveying a speaker’s tone of voice, qualities of character, and affective qualities of texts. It may also allow for a different kind of engagement with the viewer than static text, and in some cases, may explicitly direct or manipulate the attention of the viewer. In fact, the first use of kinetic typography appeared in film – specifically, Saul Bass’ opening credit sequence for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and later Psycho. This work stemmed in part from a desire to have the opening credits set the stage for the film by establishing a mood, rather than simply conveying the information of the credits. Use of kinetic typography is now commonplace for this purpose, and is also heavily used in TV advertising where the ability to convey emotive content and direct the user’s attention aligns to the goals of advertising. We believe that if it can be made accessible and understandable, the power of kinetic typography can also be applied to benefit other areas of digital communications. Another origin for time-based presentation of text comes independently from psychological studies of perception and reading, and text presentation methods such as scrolling text. One of the most fruitful of these is a method known as Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), where text is displayed one word at a time in a fixed position. Studies have shown that RSVP supports rapid reading without a need for special training. In addition, RSVP techniques provide advantages for designers because words can be treated independently. Finally, RSVP can be seen as a means for trading time for space, allowing large bodies of text to be potentially shown at readable sizes on small displays. Kinetic Typography has been explored at Carnegie Mellon University by designers and technologists since the mid-1990s. Our work takes the form of creating examples, analyzing examples, and creating a kinetic typography markup language (KTML), similar to HTML, which can be used by anyone to create kinetic typography expressions. For more information, see kinetictypography.org.
