I was browsing through the typography tagged bookmarks on Ma.gnolia.com over the weekend and ran into a video that I found extremely engaging to watch. The video was comprised of lyrics moving on screen set to music; the timing of the words appearing was synchronized to the vocals too great effect. See for yourself.

The Hush Sound – The Lions Roar

I’ve seen stuff like this before on occasion and have always been captivated. TBS did a few self promotional advertisements for Everybody loves Raymond and Seinfeld that used the technique to punctuate well-known series moments. The only unfortunate part was they used Arial Rounded Bold which in my opinion is much overused in their marketing.

A second bookmark on Ma.gnolia.com also caught my eye during my search. It was a kinetic typography video set to Samuel L. Jackson‘s amazing speech in Pulp Fiction. At a few points in the video the camera motion didn’t work very well causing the type to be lost but overall it is good. The video has been going around the web and is linked on a few different services including boing boing but check out the author’s site which has some other interesting stuff.

Intonation – Jarratt Moody

Motionographer, one of the linking sites, had a lengthy discussion about how this was ripped off from a video done by MK12 called MachoBox (boring warning). The site is an authority on motion graphics so they would know and I can see why they would say it but I don’t agree that it was “ripped off”. The author of the video is a student at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and is taking a course on kinetic typography where the instructor likely gave them the reference material to pull from for the project.

BCST 369 Time-based Typography I
This course addresses historical and contemporary typographic design concepts using film and television. Students construct graphic elements and typography for use in projects while addressing issues of motion and dynamic relationships. Prerequisite: GRDS 205.
SCAD Course List

After watching these videos I decided to see if I could find more so I went trolling through YouTube with a search for kinetic typography and didn’t really turn up anything worth watching. I did find a music video by zero 7 that is alright (not sure if it is the official video or not). If you’re wondering where you’ve heard that name before it was probably from their inclusion on the Garden State soundtrack or movie. Have you seen anything out there like this? I’d love some more links to check out.

Trebuchet is a font by Vincent Connare who is also the creator of Comic Sans which I have mentioned around here before. It is packaged with Windows and Internet Explorer/Office for the Mac and thus is considered “almost” web-safe. During web browsing I have noticed it has started to be used more and more in varying roles. I have used it for headings on previous designs and it generally looks good since it has a lot of interesting characteristics.

The problem with the article is that at smaller font sizes Trebuchet is increasingly difficult to read and thus I was unable to process the paragraphs at my normal reading speed. It is a known fact that you can dig up using Google. Specifically you will notice that the lowercase “L” isn’t aways spaced properly creating dark spots where it is too close to other letters. Also there are spacing problems of the opposite nature between the lowercase “I” and “T”. Overall a body of text set in Trebuchet looks jumpy and inconsistent (i.e. Doesn’t have a consistent gray value).

One second while I mount my soapbox…

Save your interesting fonts for headings and titles. Body copy and other smaller text should be in a very legible font so that it is not a chore to read your site. Thank you and goodnight.

I saw this on reddit today and thought it would amuse a few of you as it did me. I have used Comic Sans on occasion to mimic comic book style in Photoshop and it looks great. The guys at Little Gamers also use it for their comic (9pt regular all-caps, if you were curious). The opening titles for the movie Sky High also take advantage of it, they use it drop shadowed in all-caps, such a fun movie to watch.

Comic Sans is certainly easy to read and is instantly recognizable but is not generally appropriate for use. Unfortunately, you can find tons of sites out there that use it since it is considered a “Web Safe” font of which there are very few. I don’t support a full out ban (other than for comedic purposes) but I agree that it should be a lot less used in the wild.

Update: The comment on Reddit turned up the page of one Vincent Connare the designer of Comic Sans. He gives the history of the font.

Lately I’ve become very interested in typography and what works and doesn’t work. I ventured to the library the other day and grabbed a few tomes that I am reading slowly. It certainly is a very dense topic but is extremely interesting. Once you start to recognize a certain font coming up again and again on posters, in manuals and on TV your interest starts to snowball. Lately I have been noticing Century Gothic everywhere I go, I even use it on my new commercial site. Take a very good look at the small A character it is the defining character of this font. You can see that the circle is reused throughout the small letters with the exact same dimensions. Trust me it is everywhere and now you will notice it too. :o)