Type and Tactic

Jonathan Pfeiffer,
de.MO - Designer

Today’s typographic polemics ought not to limit investigations simply to how motion affects the readability and meaning of the typographic message in dynamic screen-based contexts. Rather, a generation of young designers must learn and explore how readers can affect the meaning and readability of the message. For far too long design students have been taught to evoke meaning and emotion, following typographic paradigms to create expression and understanding for the reader. Kinetic type positions the designer to not only create, but empower the reader. The ability to allow users control of type in motion will break the reader free from the page’s inert imposition on learning.

Animating type enables designers to develop new strategies for the reading of continuous texts on the web and interface technologies. The addition of motion allows new typographic hierarchies to be integrated within the text block itself. With this typography, readers are granted access to the same information and content via different inner-textual hierarchies that are generated for varying reading levels. Further programming and kinetics can be used by the designer to smoothly hide or push back information in the text while still allowing the reader to access these pieces of text by choice.

To achieve major steps in the kinetic display of information, typographic practice must be taught along with semiotics, psychology, and reading research, as well as writing and editorial practices. Students must learn to research, analyze, and express textual information visually to organize reader direction before setting continuous texts in motion aesthetically.