Expressive Typography using Macromedia Flash

Expressive Typography points at some excellent websites that illustrate the limitless possibilities of experimental type in Macromedia Flash and bring typography to life. As these examples show, Expressive and Kinetic typography can convey moods, ideas and aesthetics with an interpretive potential that static type cannot thereby infusing a message with life.

The inspiration for this work undoubtedly came from Arabic Calligraphs where the poem or verse is a shaped picture of the poems content. Ni9e.com follows this tradition of typo-pictures with some excellent work grouped under Typographical Illustrations. Typedrawing is a unique drawing application that lets you draw with type. This Flash application is both fun and intuitive to use. You can add your own drawing to the database that contains some of the author’s favourite creations. Another interesting on-topic experiment is Typoscope where simple-yet-effective interactive kaleidoscopic patterns are generated using type. In a similar vein to Typedrawing is the playful Robotype which allows you to create anthropomorphic (and other) designs from typography using Univers, Bodoni, Future and Helvetica. Apollinaire would have loved both of these.

Keats at the excellent Storynest arranges the words ‘Here Lies one whose name was writ in water’ in a circular form. Mouse proximity effects the size of each of the letter, more importantly a center point (full-stop?) can be teased to effect the circle as if where behaving like water. Typorganism is a series communication experiments exploring computational interaction design and interactive kinetic typography based on the metaphor ‘Type is Lifeform’. ‘Dna’ recombines spheres on a nucleic spiral into letters when a key is hit. The ingenious ‘Weight’ interactively simulates the weighing of type with a set of scales.

Letters are not just glyphs for communication they are also real physical shapes that can be played with and animated to create complex semiotic experiences with extra layers of metaphor.