typefour. type overview.

Technologies like the iphone and ipad are enrapturing everyone these days. There is this trend with new and upcoming ideas, pushing the technologies, and giving us new products. This trend has always been around, but this latest set of new products in the realm of technology opens up a vast amount of room for design to flourish in. These new platforms allow us to play with interactivity and motion and push its capabilities. This trend, to some extent, has the ability to feel a bit ahead of its time. All of this directly correlates with what I want to focus on for this project, which is an animated typeface.

So the trend I’m working with is more of a trend with technology, but I want to use that trend to directly influence what I do. The project would be digitally made for the computer, web, smartphone, tablet, and the like. This idea is important because it is ahead of its time in the sense that no one has really experimented with this concept to its full potential I don’t feel. But, someone has to start it, so why not take a crack at it?

The core question of this direction that I can think of right now is, “What can a typeface be?” A typeface, even on screen, is a static form that has a set shape. There are millions of videos out there of kinetic typography, but that is still a static typeface that is given an animated build onto the screen, it’s final shape is still a static shape. What I want to do is push away from this idea of the static and moving solely into the idea of motion. How can a typeface exist solely in motion, and never exist in static form? Unless it is in the same vein as Mo’s project last year where only a portion of the letterform is ever on the screen at any one moment, it doesn’t really seem like there can be. If someone wants to take a screen capture of the typeface they can, but they would completely lose the core idea of the typeface. The mission I want to set out on is this idea of creating something that truly can only exist in motion. To create a typeface that has a layer of information that you completely lose without the motion, having the motion be critical for understanding the typeface fully.