Type that Moves and Grooves!
It’s Sunday!
Arguably the second best day of the week, after Saturday of course. It’s also the final day of TypeWknd, aaaand the day of my talk! 🤭
Let’s get into The Roundup! 💌
🕺 Type that Moves 💃
ANIMATED TYPEFACES. Snappy videos with text effects are all the rage. To be fair, they have been for a while, and by my estimate, they ain’t going anywhere anytime soon! Kinetic typography is an animation technique that mixes movement and text to convey ideas and evoke emotion. Having too much text on the screen to read and understand can be overwhelming, but when done purposefully— using precise timing, music, and visual emphasis— text-based videos can be entertaining and effective.
If you’re keen on checking out some great videos that use kinetic typography, check out Nice Type.
But today, I also bring you— Animography — a webshop and type-foundry that curates animated typefaces for sale (some free!) to use and customise with Adobe After Effects. On their website, you’ll of course find a range of animated typefaces as you would on any foundry, but here, each employing a different style of motion. There’s also tutorials and tools to help get you started.
🤖 From Code to Cursive 🖋
RECURSIVE. Today’s face is Recursive, the closest to a typeface that almost dances! There’s so much and so little I can justifiably explain about Recursive. It’s an extensive variable font family, and that’s the ‘so much’ part (we’ll get deep into variable fonts some other time. Stay tuned!) and the ‘so little’ is because Recursive speaks for itself. Also, it’s free 😮
Recursive draws inspiration from single-stroke casual sign-painting, a style of brush writing that is stylistically flexible and warmly energetic. The range of the font styles are across two axes— monospace to sans and linear to casual, and fonts everywhere in between. Taking full advantage of variable font technology, Recursive has an unprecedented level of flexibility, all from a single font file (read: variable fonts).
h/t to my friend, Gaurika Singhal for introducing me to Recursive.
🦾 Pro Moves 🦾
KINETIX. If you’re feeling a little more fiesty and/or want to seriously upgrade your Instagram game, check out Kinetix by Ezra Cohen. Kinetix is a modular mograph (hip-speak for motion graphics) and kinetic text animation template for Adobe After Effects. There are about 25 different templates, the trendiest and coolest in the biz, all customisable. If you’re having trouble or want to know how to go about using Kinetix, Ezra has also created this tutorial on how to use and make the best of it.
Hope you enjoyed this issue, and it inspires you to do a little solo-dance after the read! Bonus tip:
to dance along to! And if you know what my talk at TypeWknd is about, you’ll get this reference 😉
As always, reply to this email with any thoughts and feedback, drop me a DM on Twitter or a comment below! 👇
Until next time,
🌈 Sneha.