Type In Motion

Dan Boyarski, Professor School of Design Carnegie Mellon University

t is known by different names type in motion, motion graphics, kinetic typography, moving letters, etc.
may point to a form of communication without boundaries. What that form is remains to be seen. While we celebrate type in motion today, it is instructive to look back over history to understand our facination with movement and our attempts to capture and replicate it. Some of the earliest marks made by Western man in caves located in France attempt to depict a hunt in progress. Hunters chase a mastodon, shooting arrows at it, a scene forever frozen in time. Life is movement, and artists over history have attempted to portray events in life, often by capturing a moment, or a movement, in time. The results have been paintings and sculptures, stories and dances, and more recently, photographs and films. The writer William Faulkner observed, The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Graphic designers also have a rich legacy to build on. Long before the advent of the moving picture (movies), there were occasional attempts at giving life to type in print. A delightful

What the names describe is a computer or movie screen filled with type that flies around, letterforms that morph, or words that appear and disappear to a musical beat. On the quieter side, there are measured sequences of words that tell a story, reveal a poem, or give instruction. Examples today abound in film titles, music videos, television advertisements, web sites, CDs, and service kiosks. What is common to these examples is typography that doesnt stand still. In contrast to static or fixed type in printed matter, where ink is married to paper, type that works with time as a design element produces dynamic form that is synonymous with new media, movies, and computers. These forms, shaped by time and movement, are often compared to choreography, music, and the spoken word. There has never been a time when this amount of attention has been paid to type in motion; we have books and articles on the subject, as well as conferences and exhibitions devoted to showing and understanding this work. Movement is an abstract language, with the potential of being understood across cultures, so it follows that type in motion

example is Lewis Carrolls attempt, in his 1865 book Alices Adventures in Wonderland, to visualize The Mouses Tale which sets words in the shape of a mouses tail. This 19th century example of the use of typographic form to reflect the subject of the text is later exploited by Guillaume Apollinaire fifty years later in France with his Ideogrammes Lyriques (figurative poems), explorations at creating pictures with typographic arrangements. Setting type in prescribed shapes is not new; early handset books in Europe, for example, sometimes set the colophon, at the end of the book, in a particular shape, more for visual effect than semantic rationale. But in Carrolls The Mouses Tale, word and image are one, a unique fusion of the verbal and visual. The Futurists and Dadaists in the early decades of 20th century Europe wrestled with type in ways that challenged the vertical and horizontal conventions of the printed page. They used type to visually suggest sounds and movements, as in Lucio Vennas 1917 piece, Circo Equestre. Here, the dynamic composition captures the liveliness of the circus, complete with words, such as Braa.....voooooo! that are yelled out by the ringmaster or the crowd. Type becomes image, and we are given the chance to see and hear the excitement! Another classic example is Apollinaires Il Pleut/Rain (1916) which visually draws diagonal lines of rain with words. Drawing pictures with type was but one avenue in this rebellion against typographic convention; other avenues included dynamic page compositions that included a range of typeface, sizes, weights, and diagonals. As the century progressed, other designers and artists, such as Malevich, Lissitzky, and Zwart, continued this challenge

to convention with their dynamic and asymmetrical typography. Massins The Bald Soprano (1964) a book that presents Eugene Ionescos absurdist play in words and images raises dynamic typography to a new level. Massins visually rich rendering of the spoken word allows the reader to hear the different actors speak their lines in a much more engaging way than conventional type ever could. It is important and sobering to understand that this dynamic typography was achieved long before computers arrived on the scene to help manipulate type. Along with typographic explorations in print, there were film explorations throughout the 20th century. Many early animated examples are not typographic in content, but explorations in abstract painting with motion (Oskar Fishinger, Hans Richter, Len Lye, for example) or storytelling with animated characters (Winsor McKay, Walt Disney). All these examples involved creating hundreds of cel drawings and using a special camera to photograph these cels one at a time, or minutely moving a

physical object and photographing each movement frame by frame. When the resulting film strip was projected at a set rate (usually 24 frames per second), audiences saw moving images and were delighted. In the 1940s and 50s, Norman McLaren (National Film Board of Canada) painted directly on the clear film strip, allowing him to bypass the camera entirely. By projecting the resulting sequences, he showed pure film movement -- animated painting in the purest sense. This avenue of exploration into (often abstract) film animation has today been eclipsed by the more commercially lucrative animated stories of the Disney and Pixar kind. Thankfully, there is always the fringe element, artists exploring and pushing the boundaries of the medium and the art. It was a only a matter of time before film titles became an area of exploration for a few adventurous graphic designers. Saul Bass, a thriving designer in Los Angeles, was first asked by film director Otto Preminger to design titles for his 1955 film, The Man With the

References: The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco design by Massin, 1964 Hybrid Imagery by April Greiman, 1990 Pioneers of Modern Typography by Herbert Spencer, 1983 Saul Bass interview by Pamela Haskin for Film Quarterly, fall 1996 Seven Faces of Time: An Aesthetic for Cinema by Robert Gessner, 1965 an essay in The Nature and Art of Motion edited by Gyorgy Kepes

Golden Arm. Bass had designed the promotional print material for the film, so Preminger decided it made sense for Bass to design the titles as well. It took the directors foresight and the designers courage to venture into this territory with few precedents. Fifty years later, we have an impressive body of film title work from Saul Bass and other designers who explored this rich intersection of visual communication and film. The early examples were produced with traditional animation techniques, and what makes them memorable is their ability to capture the mood of a film with type, image, motion, and sound. With the advent of the computer and appropriate software, designers were given new tools to move type and merge visual and aural elements in seamless ways. Nonetheless, a successful film title sequence still depends, as it always has, on its ability to reach the viewers heart and mind through his eyes and ears. The designer April Greiman says, Design must seduce, shape, and, perhaps more importantly, evoke emotional response. It is the emotional response that is critical to introducing a film to an audience with its title sequence and to setting the stage for the story to unfold. This demands an understanding of pacing, rhythm, and sequence on the one hand, and narrative structure, visual and aural juxtaposition, and dramatic effect on the other. Film title sequences may be the most public of recent explorations into type in motion, but there are other, often more challenging, avenues being pursued. The whole field of interaction design has a component of information display that may involve type in dynamic environments. Muriel Coopers Visual Language Workshop at MIT in the last

two decades of the 20th century broke new ground in exploring these landscapes of information. The work of YinYin Wong, Suguru Ishizaki, and David Small, among others in Coopers lab, helped define some of these directions. John Maeda, now at MIT, continues the tradition, but with his own approach to computational design, interaction, and aesthetics. At Carnegie Mellon Universitys School of Design, we explore kinetic typography within the contexts of information design, narrative, and emotional voice. Issues related to interactivity, participant control, and navigation continue to challenge us in contexts as varied as online communications to robotics. Many other academic and research institutions around the world, where some of the bravest explorations are taking place unencumbered by commercial constraints, will chart the course for type in motion in the future. While life is movement, we also know that movement does not always have to be fast or out of control. Life shows us that there can be slow movement, with graceful and poetic progression. There is even imperceptable movement, as in the rotation of planet earth or the growth of plants. Zen masters remind us that it is often in the midst of silence that we hear what needs to be heard. Perhaps it is time for us to slow down and reflect on where this revolution is headed the one that started a century ago with liberating the word from the printed page and giving it the freedom to move in real or virtual space.
This essay was published in the TypoJanchi exhibition catalog, in conjunction with the first international typographic exhibition, October 2001, Seoul, Korea.