Favorite Kinematic Typography

Kinematic typography refers to the art and technique of expression with moving text.

My design colleagues have been sharing these short typographic films with me for months. Simply mesmerizing. Thanks everybody!

If you start digging, you’ll find hundreds more of these on YouTube. You could spend hours, so I’ve tried to narrow it down to a few of the better examples. Many utilize very similar techniques. Here are a handful that I never tire of watching. These in particular, pair typography with some of our favorite scenes from movies and TV shows. I believe these are student projects (I apologize but it’s really hard to find proper credits). Enjoy…

Ocean’s Eleven

Psycho

The Office (Benito Mussolini’s “War Statement” as interpreted by the incomparable Dwight Schrute)

The Big Lebowski (animated by Koos Dekker)

This Type Tastes Good

Best explanation of what “typography” is. This clever motion piece was created by students, Marcos “Boca” Ceravolo and Ryan Uhrich, for the 4 Motion Design class at the Vancouver Film School.

“Typography is what language looks like.” —Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type

“A good typographer is someone who communicates a point of view with skill and imagination, and makes the type taste good.” —Jeffrey Keedy

Alphabet Soup

Student work from my most recent Typography and Layout class at Cuyahoga Community College, Western Campus. The objective was to select a nursery rhyme or fairy tale and illustrate a scene from it using only Garamond or Futura letterforms and punctuation. Inspired by Bembo’s Zoo.

Modernist Posters

Student work from my most recent Typography and Layout class at Cuyahoga Community College, Western Campus. The objective was to research a modernist designer and their art movement. Each student made an oral presentation about their topic and presented their poster at the end. The poster is meant to promote a fictitious museum exhibition and pay tribute to one of the designers from that movement. It had to convey proper hierarchy and use typefaces and colors appropriate for that time period.

Type City Cleveland

A collaboration between The Cleveland Institute of Art and Veer. Design students were to choose a location in Cleveland, choose a typeface from Veer that is appropriate for their location, and then render an image of their location using that typeface.

http://www.ramsaycreative.com/cia/2007-type-city-cleveland/index.html