easily animated font for motion graphics

samang

Hi, I am a graphic designer and motion designer from Cleveland, Ohio. I have designed other fonts in the past for various client specific uses but never at the scale of what I have been working on with this typeface. I am very curious to get feedback. Upfront you need to know this is not a traditional design. This entire family was designed around the idea of being easily animated for motion graphics and so when making decisions about design or functionality they came down to how well it would perform when animated primarily in After Effects. Things like geometry and straight lines were important for stacking, repetition, grids and alignments of characters on screen. straight strokes can extend infinitely into space more easily than curved or gently arced letterforms. Perfect circles are used predominantly for rotating characters in animation without wobble. The font is designed for very large on screen display sizes only. it was designed around an original 16x9 lowercase letter /o. A grid was built from there for cap height and ascenders and descenders. the width was divided into thirds for cinematography purposes. you can see the result in the weight variation between the standard and heavy variants. the vertical strokes are 1/3rd of the width of the entire character - the rule of thirds.

The /j /r and /t have special variants that extend above and below the baseline to create unique letter and word opportunities. These can be seen on the pages with the lowercase letters. words have been set showing how these letters perform with standard letter and alternate variant. there are ligatures, etc.

Readability is a lesser concern to visual impact of form and counter form. As a display only font for motion graphics this will be used to set word/phrase length at most on screen. A sentence would be objectionably long setting in this font. 

I have been getting feedback from 3D animators and motion graphics designers, but I really want feedback from type designers as well since this is so non-traditional. I haven't seen a font designed specifically to animate and was curious what you all thought. I can see this as a variable font in the future, but that's not really the point I was making of animating with a font for motion graphics.

I'm sorry for the long description, please let me know your questions or what I didn't describe well enough. I can provide better imagery for anything you have questions about as well. I just tried to put together enough pages in the attached pdf so you could see the details well enough. thank you in advance for any feedback.

Nick Shinn

There are two aspects to consider.

First, function:

Fonts with a monowidth constraint are amenable to animation, i.e. “typewriter” or monowidth fonts. Also, typefaces that are uniwidth, which means different weights are the same width.

Variable fonts are inherently animate-able, with slider as timeline.
This new tech is ripe for developing new animation effects, as explained at Google;


Secondly, aesthetics:

These look like student designs, and also remind me of certain “techno” fonts that were made 25 years ago.

I would concentrate on making the idiosyncracies of the design less obvious, and developing simpler designs in tandem with animations, in other words, experimenting to see how the designs perform in certain transformations, and refining the design in a series of feedback loops.

samang

@Nick Shinn I'm absolutely not trying to design a variable font here or monowidth font. I'm not sure how a typewriter font is amenable to animation, we must be seeing things differently here. I probably am not explaining well enough, but being able to create outlines and animate the letterforms by stretching, scaling, rotating, repeating, etc, is difficult on forms that have subtle curves. by basing letterforms off rigid geometry, I am hoping to have something more easily animatable at the node level after outlined in After Effects. I agree this restriction makes the form less aesthetic immediately, but the potential for movement is much greater.

I was not going for a techno font, however, I get that reference. it's actually based more on brutalist architecture and modernism. I debated going with a more natural proportion to the letterform and have quite a few sketches at those proportions. I might go back to those sketches to simply avoid this reference. it would mean a whole different look for sure and I would lose the cinema proportions - a major tradeoff. 

I did animate many letterforms in short sequence and in loop while designing. that was the point obviously and part of the process. I appreciate your feedback. I'll look into my initial sketches and see about the other proportions and designs I initially had and maybe consider them more strongly again. thanks

Ray Larabie

Check out a font I made called Krait. It's in the public domain, so you can deconstruct it if you like—no rules. It has a brutalist architecture vibe and possibly lends itself to the type of animation you're talking about. Or maybe you can get some ideas from it.

samang

@Ray Larabie I really appreciate. I see you have an overall rounded rectangle as a base form. yea, I'll download and play with it. Thanks a lot. I think this will help a lot!

samang

Here's a few links of very quick example animations since I neglected to show what I mean about 'animate-able' (That is a term we use often in After Effects.) Seeking more complex sub character movements not just character and word animations. I'm talking about form and counter form animations.

examples:
love | peace | joy

Nick Shinn

I see what you mean.
This is a specific kind of “sub-character” typographic animation which might be described as “partial BCP transformation”, the distortion of letter forms from their original shape in the fonts being applied to only a part of each glyph, and being achieved by selection of BCPs, not the whole glyph. 

BTW, I’ve designed a typeface, Aptly, which would be suitable for this kind of thing, although I didn’t have animation specifically in mind. 

samang

@Nick Shinn dude I'll totally check it out. did a lot of research at first but looking for any suggestions that will help. thanks again for your time. appreciated.

Tofu Type Foundry

DJR’s Fit would be easy to animate, although legibility can be poor depending on how far you push it.

samang

@Tofu Type Foundry yes, nice one. definitely lends itself. only uppercase, but can see great possibility here. this is one very close to use as inspiration. thanks!!