KineticTypography

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: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/kt/

Since the 16th century, typography has become a major artistic endeavour by itself, really becoming important with the mass production printing press. However, one obvious shift from PrintCulture? to DigitalMedia? is that the visual is now active. It is now possible for the words on the screen to be animated whereas before they were static, fixed. This affords new ways of conveying meaning with a simple glyph, as the glyph can now operate across time (and possible feedback).

This turns the text into PerformanceArt, but it could just be an animation. Some might criticize that it is just animation, but that would be disingenius. Text itself is also an image, but as MarshallMcLuhan noted, while we look at the television screen and notice the font and the colour of the text, we hover above the text on the page. Thus, text is somehow privileged in ways that visuals are not. The mere separation of a glyph from the ground, and the recognition of that glyph as part of a linguistic alphabet, arranged in a string makes text meaningfully different than say an oil painting or a photograph.

We already know from typography that fonts convey meaning through style (FormOverContent). This text feels different than this text which in turn isn't as important as this text. It follows that text that jiggles or fades out as it is read loads different cues and feelings into the text than what could be presented as economically in just typeface fixed on the page. The trade off is that KineticTypography disrupts common ReadingPractice? by controlling the pace, order, and intensity of reading. Even for fairly fixed kinetic text, where text maintains its general spatial relationship to both other text and the ground even if made active in other ways, the added motion may disrupt the reading habits of users (a la Wiki:JigglingBaloney).

KineticTypography might also be interactive. Certainly many websites take advantage of this with rollover hyperlinks that highlight when the mouse goes near them.

KineticTypography could be useful for DigitalPoetry?.

NOTE: The KineticTypography library is [available] under the GeneralPublicLicense for Java 1.4.

References

Lewis, J. E. and Weyers, A. (1999) ActiveText: Creating dynamic and interactive texts. Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology: Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, Asheville, North Carolina, November 7-10, 131-140. Available from http://www.aalab.net/projects/ActiveText/ActiveTextUIST99/ActiveTextUIST99.htm [See also their [movie]]

Uekita, Y., Harada, Y., Furukata, M. (1999). Possibility of kinetic typography expression in the internet art museum. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 'Human Communication and Cybernetics', Tokyo, Japan, October 12-15, 1999.

Wong, Y. Y. (1995). Temporal typography: Characterization of time-varying typographic forms. Master's degree thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

CategoryArt CategoryInformationVisualization CategoryText

KineticTypography

References

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