Jeroen Krielaars had meant to create an animated typeface as a personal project - and for no other reason than because he could. But within weeks of his posting the finished product online, top design blogs and typography enthusiasts around the world were buzzing about the little-known Dutch graphic designer's captivating new font, cleverly called Moshun. Composed of moving lines and geometric shapes, the typeface was suddenly being mentioned on Fast Company's design blog and on websites like Motionographer and Creative Review. "I didn't really expect it [would be]so well-received," the designer, who heads a one-man studio called Calango, said by phone from Amsterdam. "Basically, it's just an idea that popped into my head."
What Krielaars had unwittingly tapped into is a burgeoning area of exploration within the graphic design industry into animated fonts and logos. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated computer programs, graphic designers are now able to experiment with motion like never before. And they're finding new ways to make their work stand out in a progressively multimedia world.
Animated typefaces themselves are nothing new, as Luke Hayman, partner of the international design powerhouse Pentagram, points out. They've been used in the film industry for decades to display title sequences, but the technology to produce them and the various media platforms through which they can be presented have now opened up a whole new range of opportunities, Hayman says from Pentagram's office in New York. "I think it's very exciting for graphic designers. Suddenly they can do this on their desktops, on their regular daytime machines," he said, noting that "digital tools have given birth to a Renaissance of typography."
Whereas it once took designers months to create new fonts and to tinker with italics or give letters different weights, Krielaars created Moshun using the program Adobe After Effects in less than three days. And the reaction is just as immediate: One need only look to Google's interactive animated dot logo, temporarily displayed in September, to see the visceral reaction - both positive and negative - that people have to this new generation of animated typography. The logo featured a cluster of multi-coloured dots scattered across Google's home page, which changed sizes and swirled as users moved the cursor across the screen and regrouped when the cursor was still. "Um, am I the only one playing with the Google logo today like a giddy little toddler," one Twitter user was quoted by CNN as saying. Others were unimpressed. "These [moving dots]are incredibly distracting," one user wrote on Google's help forum. "There needs to be a clean, non-animated page option at all times."
Similarly, a new animated logo that Hayman designed for the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina is also generating strongly mixed reaction, according to the gallery's executive director, Mark Leach. While some love it, others have called the new logo, which shows the letters S, E, C, C and A slowing moving horizontally toward and away from each other, "adolescent" and "unsophisticated." "But any good mark does leave an impression," Leach says, adding that the movement fits with the centre's identity as a gallery with ever-changing art exhibits. "That's the kind of dynamic charge, intellectually and visually, that we were looking for."
Despite his enthusiasm for animated branding, Hayman said it should be used strategically, recognizing that it can be gimmicky and confusing if used the wrong way. For that reason, it is still teetering between being an industry curiosity and widespread commercial use. In Toronto, type designer Patrick Griffin of Canada Type is skeptical of where all this experimentation in animation will lead.
"Aside from movie titling and credits and stuff like that, I don't see this taking off as a branch of design on its own," he says. "I can see [graphic design]students drooling over this kind of stuff or trying to make this kind of stuff. But as far as this kind of specific art form breaking into the design mainstream, I doubt it."
Even so, Krielaars and others like him will continue to play with the animation technology at their fingertips. "I would love to do this kind of stuff for a client some day," he says. "That would be awesome."
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