Dynamic typography that blows any filter away.
In May 2007 some students and myself completed a video project for the University of Illinois Provost office. For this piece we struggled for a time with exactly how we wanted to capture the tone and mood of the piece typographically. There was already a rich, dimensional / info-graphics approach that we were taking with some of the type but we wanted to balance that with some more humanistic type treatments to both capture the humanistic nature of the content but to also provide a typographic bridge to the image making we had done which was also very humanistic.
So, I did what I always tend to do in these situations and put on my mad-scientist hat and started playing with doing things in ways I have never done them before. Initially I was playing around in my head, with visions of ink+water mixing. Eventually this evolved into type eroding, dissolving, and fading—but how to do it. I knew a filter would simply not do it justice.
Process
I tried everything, inkjet on paper placed in a tub, transfer marker on paper, almost every chemical and medium combination I could think of (and some I probably shouldn’t have). Nothing was producing satisfactory results. The ink or toner (I tried both) simply was not running or evolving fast enough or sometimes even at all. The problem was the paper was holding the ink too readily. So, I changed media.
Initially I began working with ink-jet on transparencies. The first attempts used transparency media designed for the inkjet (I didn’t want to kill my printer!). Again, the ink was simply too cured into the medium. Water, mineral spirits, alcohol…you name it. Nothing would make it run like I envisioned. So, I threw all caution to the wind (which usually yields the best results) and went out and bought a box of “old fashioned”, plain-jane, mylar transparencies for overhead projectors—the kind my teachers used to use in high school—and prayed my printer would not hate me for life (and that the ink would even stick at all)! Success. It worked like a charm.
The next challenge was filming the text as it evolved. For this I was able to set-up the camera directly over a shallow pan and place the mylar on a white sheet of paper in the pan. I knew we needed a white background to be able to use a blending mode to knock out everything but the text—thus the choice of the white paper. The results were far to complex and frail for a typical chroma-key approach. The surface was then evenly lit and filmed at standard 1080i HDV with a Sony HVR-Z1U camera. In retrospect, it would have been much easier if I could have acquired a white tray for the shoot. You can see in the raw results below that as the paper became saturated with spill-over water, it became semi-transparent and the grey from the metal pan began to show through. Fortunately this didn’t pose a problem in post.
Results
In the mylar went, out came beautiful type. On occasion there were small flaws and areas where the letterforms had begun to bleed and were not crisp, but it was very organic so it worked well with the artistic direction I had for this piece. Another serendipitous result was than not only did the ink run, but it left ethereal remnants of the original letterforms. The way in which the ink ran was also unexpected and beautiful. As the solvent (in this case water) would sit over the ink, depending on how long the ink had dried, it would sometimes take a few seconds for the ink to “let go” and begin to run. But, when it did, it did so with amazing bursts.
Below are some clips from the raw experiments which I have posted to YouTube:
The full project can be found on the Time of Our Singing page and can be seen in the finished video for “Time of Our Singing” below:
Conclusions
Too often we become seduced by the seeming power of filters, plugins and their combinations to create engaging dynamic typography. While I am not denying the value of or the success of this methodology (type via technology) I am hoping to remind graphic designers that sometimes—especially when organic or humanistic aesthetics are the desired outcomes—the best results come from organic processes. It is a reminder that design is a process and that sometimes that process has to come off of the machine and back into the studio.