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Black letters, words, text lines, para-graphs and type pages
suitably set on the white sheet of paper the world of type. It is
only a well-trained typographers eye who can see the black
characters vibrating in the white space of a page and who realizes
that it is the white that determines the shape of the black, just
as a well-trained musicians ear knowingly registers the silence in
between sounds. Our eyes follow the text from left to right and
from top to bottom within one page. You need to turn the page in
order to start the process anew. Its the system of a book, which
seems so familiar and obvious to us. The sense of sight leads us
through the text.
On the face of it, contact with text seems much less complex
than it really is. Text, as encoded in a language, is a
descrip-tion of the world. Authors enclose their mul-tisensory
experience in words. When they describe a physical action, it is
situated in place and time, and when they talk about a metaphysical
phenomenon, it resides in the context of other similar events. It
is up to us the readers as we receive the text, to recreate the
picture of The Ackerman Steppe, to hear its silence and see the
rising Morning Star in our imagination*.
For thousands of years, images and texts have been immobilized
on the materials they are recorded upon. The clay tablets of
Babylon; Egyptian paper reed; stone tables of Greece and Rome;
vellum of the medi-eval manuscripts; paper from China they are just
various carriers for static texts and the accompanying
illustrations. The need for breaking this freeze has been as old as
our civilization. The problem is that a text, composed of letters
that build the words and sentences grouped into paragraphs, is a
complicated set of meaningful material 2+3D nr 37/2010 1
Black on white, in motion...
The storyboard for Kynetic Typography, project done by student
Paul Rand in SADI Round 2009 Time, Motion & Communica-tion,
with professor Dan Boyarski.
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Kocielniak and assistant programmers for films by Andrzej Wajda
and his Zesp Film-owy X film studio, in the early 80s.
The 1980s was the time of fascination with text passing across
the screen in commercial tv and film credits. The new Adobe
Director was the first program for managing text and images on the
Macintosh computer screen, and for synchronizing mov-ing pictures
and sound. Texts in my typogra-phy class started moving, too. And
again, a revelation: compared to students who began their
typography training by typesetting sim-ple print texts, the
students, who began their typography education working with text
ani-mation on the screen, showed a much better sense of dynamism
and typographic space in flat compositions printed on paper.
Some-thing had clicked in their heads.
Moving from the strict discipline of ana-logue records to
numerical operations has been a revolutionary change in
com-munication processes. Its merit compares to moving from manual
copying of incunabula to book multiplication by printing. Just as
the invention of print was closely connected with demand for
knowledge during the Re-
naissance and Reformation, the numerical record released an
avalanche of new media, and unlimited demand for content it could
bear.
Computers, with their increasing opera-tion speed and memory
capacity, had opened a field for advanced experiments with content
visualization. The leaders and inspirators of this research were
Dan Boyar-ski at the Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and
Muriel Cooper at the MIT Media Laboratory in Boston. In the 1990s,
their students created projects that broad-ened our visual
awareness and opened new vistas for designers. Not only texts, but
even complex statistical data and advanced mod-els of various
processes, would appear flu-ently and could be processed in the
virtual space of amonitor.
Now, that we are able to show nearly ev-erything on the screen,
there arises an irresistible question what cant we show? Screen
frame is the limit. We need to sit at the monitor and look into it.
Behind the screen window, there is adeep virtual stage
images and texts placed in computer mem-ory where the actors of
the play appear. A bigger monitor will make a bigger stage,
but should it be better? The illusion of an objects materiality
is determined by defini-tion and bit density of the picture. We are
talking about aesthesis and human senses, the information channels
used to commu-nicate with the material world we live in. Five human
senses constitute our interface. When we sit in front of computer,
we use only one of the channels constantly the vi-sion channel. It
is actively supported by two more hearing and touch channels. There
is a difficult barrier between the virtually un-limited operation
means of amodern com-puter and our sensual awareness imitating the
virtual action on the computer screen. Why dont we leave this place
then and move the projection beyond the computer frame, so that we
could also stir the other senses of a recipient? Thats the real
challenge under-taken by Jan Kubasiewicz in his Institute of
Dynamic Media in Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. His
students experiment with various forms of communication, realizing
that the final effect is strengthened when it evokes multiple
sensory experiences in the recipients awareness.
Back in the mid 1960s, this was attempt-ed by Robert Brownjohn
in the credits for James Bond film called Goldfinger.
and syntactic information. The information must be respected and
efficiently commu-nicated by a dynamic presentation, and the
addition of further sensory values.
At the end of the 80s, it was a Subaru car commercial, produced
by an advertis-ing agency, that led the way to a new era in
communication. On the black background of the tv screen, there
appeared white, kinet-ic text, running across the screen from right
to left, allowing us enough time to read the messages. It came as a
revelation that not all the lines moved at the same pace. The
varied rate of movement created the deep illusion of
three-dimensional depth behind the screen window. Text had started
moving. No more was it a moving camera passing over immobile text,
it had become a matter of animated words and sentences wander-ing
in space. For us, the designers dealing with typography, it came as
a sensational discovery: the properly stimulated brain could create
the acute illusion of movement in space. And the afterthought
followed: it was so simple standing on the curb of a busy one-way
street we perceive the speed of cars moving right next to us
differently than the speed of those moving on the op-posite side of
the road. The new method of dynamic text projection simply referred
to our everyday experience.
There was nothing new about experi-ments with kinetic text. The
industry of motion pictures cinematography had been dealing with it
for a long time. For the text to move on the screen, you needed to
pass a camera over the immobile text or else to move the text in
front of an immobile camera. Designers of film or tv credits used
many tricks in order to animate text on the
screen. Title text was placed on a long nar-row strip of paper
afixed to a cylinder turn-ing in front of the camera at the speed
the text should appear on the screen. Moving the text horizontally
was a more complicated process. In the technique of analogue photo
recording, combining two directions of mo-tion on the screen was
virtually impossible.
It was only the numerical image recording in the computer
memory, made of a string of zeros and ones, that released the image
from its setting. Then you could place a camera in front of a
monitor, where a computer screened images and texts according to an
arranged program. Thus, were created the first computer credits,
designed by Cyprian
2 2+3D nr 37/2010 2+3D nr 37/2010 3
Preparations for filming the opening for the James Bond film
Goldenfinger Upper video: GoldenFinger opening Kynetic Typography
animation created by
Dan Boyarskis student, Paul Rand
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The text titles were projected onto the naked, gold-painted body
of the model as she was moving in dark space. A film camera
recorded the action. The surprising motion of the titles was
supported by well-arranged, stereophonic sound. The effect was
terrific, but technical difficulties and the high cost of
production had closed this road to designers for long time.
Not until recently, have we had at our disposal efficient
projec-tion tools like portable high-speed and high-definition
projectors, and, above all high-speed computers. Thus, we may try
to break the traditional linear reception of text, by means of
dynamic projection enriched with sounds, music or even scent.
Tradi-tional book pages are turning into a typographic theatre,
full of magic and surprise.
Dynamic text in space is a totally new form of communication,
with a long list of questions to be answered by creators in the
course of their experiments. They need to investigate, above all,
what our cogni-tion is able to follow and absorb. In other words we
need to know both the limits of our perceptions and how to broaden
them. It is a real challenge for the creators of multisensory
com-munication.
The questions about the new lan-guage, and its range and
limita-tions, that Ewa Satalecka raises in her activities, fit into
the stream of the latest experiments created in several centres in
the world. Thats why her projects are interesting and the re-sults
so enthusiastically received. We
are now at the outset of a long path through the new world of
multisen-sory communication. Its great that Ewa Satalecka places
Polish typogra-phers at the words forefront.Krzysztof Lenk
Krzysztof Lenkwas a professor at RISD from 19822010. In those 28
years, although Lenk was teaching different aspects of design, he
was famous for his Typography and Information Design class-es.
Before he left Poland, professor Lenk was known for designing
editorial layouts for maga-zines including the weekly, Perspektywy,
and the popular science monthly, Problemy. After coming to
Providence in 1982, he began to research information design, which
lead him to found a studio with Paul Kahn called Dy-namic Diagrams.
The slogan of the studio was
consultant in visible language. Lenk specialized in isometric
diagrams. This form of mapping information seems to be created for
planning and presenting interactive structures of com-puter
software and especially web pages. We start to use this mapping
form in most of our projects, wrote Krzysztof Lenk in the Polish
design quarterly, 2+3D. Having attracted such notable clients as
IBM, Netscape and Samsung Electronics,the work of Dynamic Diagrams
was featured in various books and magazines and the team was
invited to present lectures and workshops around the world. In his
introduction to Rich-ard Wurmans book, Information Architects,
Peter Bradford, writes: he [Krzysztof Lenk] provided the first
clear diagram I have seen of electronic content.Lenk was able to
impart his knowledge and ex-perience to his students.Jacek
Mrowczyk, introduction to the catalogue for exhibition To Show. To
Explain. To Guide. / Pokaza. Wyjani. Prowadzi., The Castle Cieszyn,
2010
*the author makes a reference to the famous Sonnets from the
Crimea by Adam Mickiewicz [trans.note]
4 2+3D nr 37/2010
Muriel Coopers dynamic typography project
