We are products of the Modernist Era and our tastes and ideas are based on ideas from Modernism that we may not even be aware of.

In the Modernist era, it was generally accepted that the purpose of type was to communicate linguistic information.

As Beatrice Ward’s Crystal Goblet metaphor suggests, “printed words on a page are barely noticeable. As soon as reading begins, our perception of typography ends”.

This would suggest that variation in typeface is irrelevant. Indeed, many Modernist typogra- phers regarded visual characteristics as insig- nificant to the meaning of a word. According to semioticians, the same word in different font, or different handwriting, could be interpreted as the same sign. Saussure felt that “the actual mode of inscription is irrelevant”, being unim- portant for the meaning of a word. 1884 History of Kinetic Typography

Eadweard Muybridge is often called the father of the motion picture because of his photographic studies of animal motion. Animal locomotion first came to Muy- bridge’s attention when he was asked to settle a bet as to whether a horses hooves all left the ground during full gallop. His set-up required multiple cameras placed in a long line each of which had a special shutter in front that was triggered electromagnetically by the horse as it made contact with wires stretched across the track. It was the first successful pho- tographic representation of a horse in mo- tion.

http://www.muybridge.org/Art/First-Filmed-Kiss/15747607_cNw4D#1182259047_ 1899 History of With the advent of film and graphic anima- Kinetic Typography tion, the possibility of matching text and motion emerged.

Examples of animated letterforms appeared as early as 1899 in the advertising work of George Melies.

Early feature films contained temporal typogra- phy, but this was largely static text, presented sequentially and subjected to cinematic transi- tions. 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti The Futurist movement aimed to detach (1876-1944) completely from the past and look to the future by calling for the destruction of The poet and guiding light of Fu- museums and libraries. turism carried out some of the most important musical experi- It promoted a new beauty of speed ments of the early 20th Century through aggressive means. through his “mots en liberté” and his “Sintesi per il Teatro Tadio- Marinetti wrote the Futurist Manifesto, fonico.” All his theoretical works published in Le Figaro in 1909. are specifically concerned with music, from his manifestos to his various writings. 1913

Fortunato Depero’s work is an example of how the futurist tech- niques were used in the commerical and advertising world.

Edward McKnight Kauffer, poster for daily Herald, 1913.

This work allows a clearer understanding of the use of power and military imagery in commericial design. Completed, four years after the manifesto of the Futur- ists was published. It provides an example of how Futurists ideals were thought interna- The experimental styles in both Depero and Kauffer’s both in- tionally, even if not directly clude the sharp black and white fragments presented diagonally influenced by it. to illustrate movement throughout the page. 1914

Marinetti published the sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb in 1914. It is a graphic account of the Battle of Tripoli and uses expressive typography with poetic impressions to illus- trate the repetition of the drumbeat of war as a powerful machine.

Futurist typographer F.T. Marinetti sought to represent the spoken word through vi- sual characteristics of typography. Although Marinetti did not aim to create images with type, his experiments demonstrate the con- tribution that visual features make to the

F.T. Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tumb (Parole in Liberta), 1914 meaning of printed type. 1916

Tristan Tzara’s poem The Admirals Looking For a House to Rent is a parable about the negative implications of war and imperialism. The poem, though seeming to be printed structurally sensible, becomes quite a semantic overload once recited with words colliding in a field of sound so that the actual meaning was refective of the current political situation.

Tristan Tzara , reading “The Admirals Looking For a House To Rent”

To hear it http://www.virtual-circuit.org/audio/Tzara/page483.html 1917

The De Stijl movement helped to distance the printed word from the perception of type is a mechanised version of writ- ten script. De Stijl type was not constructed from strokes, but from geometric forms. More significantly to this investiga- tion into the typed image, the geometric primitives were the same as those used to con- struct images. Designers in- cluding Theo van Doesburg used an interchangeable array of polygons to construct text and image, proving that, at least at the point of construc- tion, type and image can be considered in the same terms. Theo van Doesburg, De Stijl (journal cover), 1917. 1918

In much spoken and written lan- guage, the word refers to some- Guillaume Apollinaire’s thing beyond itself. It describes picture poetry (and subjects or events elsewhere. later, from the 1960s, Poetic language, however, concrete poetry) func- draws attention to the word it- tions simultaneously self. Audiences of poetry are as type and image. In expected to focus attention on some picture poetry, the sound of a word as much the pictorial mean- as (or more so than) the final ing corresponds to referent. In the many forms of the verbal meaning, pictorial poetry, the word itself thereby reinforcing it. is emphasized even more than In other examples, the in traditional poetry. Its appear- image interpretation ance becomes significant to the contradicts the linguis- meaning of the poem. tic meaning.

Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes, 1913-1916. 1920

The idea of the orderly be- ing expressed underneath the chaotic is crucial in un- derstanding the Futurists, especially in regards to their experiments with sound.

The idea is that the compre- hendable is better under- stood through nontraditional or incomprehendable means.

The work of Graphic Designer Jan Tschichold of the 1920s illustrates the opposite of these ideas as a reaction to the chaotic, disruptive, and violent nature of the Futurists. Tschichold set up a formulaic grid system for what he felt to be proper layout proportion. He endorsed this guideline as a tool to create clear, concise compositions every time. In addition, graphic elements and text elements were commonly seperate spheres, unlike the Futurists, who used text as graphic elements, displacing them in a way that enlivens the page. However this chaotic displacement was carefully planned and precisely execut- ed to suggest new communicative methods of the Futurists, like the sound of a drumbeat in Zang Tumb Tumb. 1923

Poet EE Cummings believed that readers should reject social conven- tions and instead incite emotion as universal truth. Therefore, some- thing so emotional as poetry and art shouldn’t be confined by the ratio- nality of punctuation or set structure. Much like the Futurists, he believed in an underlying honesty in everything, that can only be realized once con- strictions are discarded or broken. He believed the “path of the straight and narrow” limits the possibility of true experience, that truth does not rest in syntax, but rather the raw intent of things. It was not until the 1960s when opening titles began to feature typography that was truly kinetic. Scholars recognize the first feature film to extensively use kinetic typography as Alfred Hitch- cock’s North by Northwest (1959). This film’s opening title sequence—created by Saul Bass—contained ani- mated text, featuring credits that “few” in from off-screen, and finally faded out into the film itself. A similar technique Vertigo was also employed by Bass http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DU0IVmBgsQ&feature=related Anatomy of a Murder in Psycho (1960) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtRcd-BXQ8&feature=related The Man with the Golden Arm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGnpJ_KdqZE Psycho http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tek8QmKRODw It’s a Mad, Mad, World http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1A7bJD3atk&playnext=1&list=P L2E1663B97F7DE286 The Age of Innocence http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MZDtoIZZWE&feature=related David Carson, famously quoted as saying “don’t mistake legibility for communication” may be considered one of the foremost typographers of the Postmodern era. Carson shocked commentators by abandoning the established ‘rules’ of typography. In his publications, ‘Ray Gun’ and ‘Beach Culture’, type slipped off the edge of the page, was slanted, reversed, or even printing in Dingbat fonts. Car- son’s type proved the printed text can as communicate expressively, as art- ist’s brushmarks. When he took control of ‘The Face’ magazine in 1981, Neville Brody re- placed the ‘a’ in the title with a triangle. By juxtaposing type with abstract shapes, Brody demonstrated that a form can operate as either type or im- age depending on context. In many of his later works, Brody sliced and distorted letterforms so that they were no longer legible, operating as texture, pattern or abstract image. Postmodernism and the ‘Cultural Shift from Words to Pictures’

From the 1970s onwards, Postmod- ernim challenged established notions of the purpose of type. Advances in technology (such as the introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984) al- lowed designers to integrate type and image, and to experiment beyond the contraints of earlier machines.

Charles Hoel, Stajl by Malmo, c. 2007. Carson and Brody’s work emerged alongside a “cultural shift From words to pictures”. Messages that were formerly communicated through text are now conveyed largely through im- age. Even text itself is becoming more image-like. The divide between type and image is becoming increasingly blurred, to the extent that the word ‘typography’ is often not adequate to define typographic artefacts. Type is used freely and expressively, like painterly marks, as texture, as pattern, as image. Type has also escaped the page. Type now exists in the form of objects: as sculpture, as architecture, and as product. The contemporary examples displayed on this website represent just a few of the new forms and functions that take type away from its traditional role as communicator of linguistic information. What is Kinetic typography?

Kinetic typorgaphy is—the technical name for “moving text”.

It is an animation technique mixing motion and text to express ideas using animation.

This text is presented over time in a manner intended to convey or evoke a particular idea or emotion.

Some commonly seen examples of this technique include movie title se- quences and credits, web page animation and other entertainment media. Bauhaus typographers, such as Herbert Bayer and Jan Tschichold, felt that the success of a typeface could be judged ac- cording to its legibility. It was felt that type ought to be a simple, and clear as possible so as not to interfere with the linguistic message. Tschichold even went so far as to suggest that serifs are unnecessary or- namentation, and detract from the linguis- tic message. Most experimentaion in typography was in print work. Early feature films contained tem- poral typography, but this was largely static text, presented sequentially and subjected to cinematic transitions. It was not until the 1960s when opening titles began to feature ty- pography that was truly kinetic.

Scholars recognize the first feature film to extensively use kinetic typography as Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). This film’s opening title sequence—created by Saul Bass—contained animated text, featuring credits that “few” in from off-screen, and finally faded out into the film itself. A similar technique was alsoemployed by Bass in Psycho (1960). Most experimentaion in typog- raphy was in print work. Early The Art Of Film Title Design Throughout Cinema History feature films contained tem- http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/10/04/the-art-of-the-film-title-through- poral typography, but this was out-cinema-history/ largely static text, presented sequentially and subjected to cinematic transitions. It was not until the 1960s when open- ing titles began to feature ty- pography that was truly kinetic. Bass became widely known in the in- dustry after creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The subject of the film was a jazz musician’s struggle to overcome his heroin addiction, a taboo subject in the mid-’50s. Bass decided to create a controversial title sequence to match the film’s con- troversial subject. He chose the arm as the central image, as the arm is a strong image relating to drug addic- tion. The titles featured an animated, black paper cut-out arm of a heroin addict. As he expected, it caused quite a sensation. Even though Bass had been creating movie title sequences since the mid 1950s, by the early 1960s most people would have become familiar with animated graphics in their liv- ing rooms rather than at the movie theatres. However the quality of television transmis- sion was still very poor and screens were usually small, so the exciting Bond lead-ins gave audiences something television offered but could not deliver.

Robert Hewison has argued that anxiety and excitement prompted by the breakdown of long-standing social and political structures led to a shared sense that society was at a turning point. The feeling of being on the edge of a nuclear precipice and on the brink of major social upheaval, in tandem with the facilitation of mass communication through television, was reponsible for what was effectively a transformation of the most visible aspects of British culture and society in the early 1960s.

Maurice Binder, in cooperation with Robert Brownjohn, topped and tailed the titles for From Russia With Love . Binder’s famous gun barrel sequence opens the film by put- ting the audience inside the shaft of a gun as the weapon scans the screen. The figure of James Bond appears within the white circle of light that represents the view from that position. Bond crouches and fires, leaving a red stain which runs slowly down the screen (fig.32). This sequence was lifted straight from Dr No and was subsequently used to open every James Bond film. It was remade several times to accommodate a range of James Bonds wearing a variety of trouser widths. While the title sequences were part of the Bond brand image, it was this sequence that became the trademark.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Y_U4XZupY The Island of Dr. Moreau is a famously terrible movie, but it’s well-known in design circles for its excellent title sequence created by Kyle Cooper of the firm Imaginary Forces.

The title sequence in the movie Catch Me if You Can created by the firm Kuntzel + Dey- gas tells a story in a visual voice completely different from the rest of the movie, but it works because not only is it visually interesting, it evokes the era in which the film is set and sets the appropriate pace for the rest of the movie.

You can tell that the designers at Shadowplay Studios who created the titles for Thank You for Smoking had fun with the project. The sequence doesn’t attempt to tell a narra- tive story (as with Catch Me if You Can), but rather uses the unique visual vernacular of cigarette boxes to set an appropriate tone. to see the above titles sequences: http://www.interpretationbydesign.com/?p=2042

Kyle Cooper (Seven, Donnie Brasco, The Island of Dr. Moreau)

Mad Men title sequence designed by Mark Gardner and Steve Fuller of the design/pro- duction studio Imaginary Forces. http://www.imaginaryforces.com/featured-work/broadcast/rubicon/