Type in Motion 9

Live the Language

This is a series of videos created for study abroad programs. After I found it, my roommate, Joey, told me that he had watched the video of Paris, before he went there on his trip. Different people have created different videos, but they all have a unified visual style. What drives these videos? Type.

It has become a theme, in videos that I find that I like, that the videos I choose as well done videos create (almost) logos out of each new title or set of words. In these videos, each title is thought out and designed, and could pass as a logo. This makes a much more interesting experience, than seeing the same typeface or just different typefaces slabbed on the screen. Even kerning properly wouldn't do it. Each title is DESIGNED, and that makes a huge difference. Even though these title shave different fonts and styles, they all seem very unified. Even the different languages seem like they all belong to the same set of videos.

The style of the type is also something that I'd like to comment on. In a lot of my work, I use a drop shadow that has an increased size (from the standard) and no distance from the object with the opacity set to 5% to 25%. This allows for subtle separation and more legibility, but usually goes unnoticed, depending on how opaque it is. There is something very classy, however, with sticking to plain white with no drop shadow, even if it is hard to read. I noticed it YEARS ago in the Oceans movies, and it's a very slick look.

Movement of the type was one of two things. It was centered while the video was in motion, behind it. Or, it was motion tracked to objects in the scene. I think that this was a really clean and classy use of the text and titles that they were using. Motion Tracked text is sexy; it appears as part of the scene, while maintaining it's own visual aesthetic.

I love the way that each title design has the same style of pronunciation, below it. It gives more unity to the titles, as well as reminds the audience about the purpose of the video (relating to the title, Live The Language).

It was interesting seeing different languages, and seeing how designers used type design with their versions of words (symbols for Beijing). Beijing's text was very interesting to see, because the variation of font was cool to see, without the perspective of the alphabet that I am used to. I honestly never even thought of fonts for different languages that were symbol based, but it was interesting to see how different and interesting symbols can look with font variation.


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