There is a hive of activity around visual effects for kinetic typography. Individual artists like Kiel Mutschelknaus and firms like DIA (founded by Creative Director and musician Mitch Paone and Managing Partner Meg Donohoe) have been pushing the bleeding edge of typography in motion for the last five years. And there’s a seemingly endless stream of incredible talent in sound and music.
Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano by Landor & Fitch.
These interactive font experiences are built from type’s ability to interact with all media forms. In variable fonts we have unknowingly built the axes that enable fonts to move closer towards typographic APIs, where the input of sound and light can manipulate the look and feel of words. This responsive approach to typography will soon enable fonts that dial into our personal profiles, fonts that speak directly to us as individuals, that adapt to our surroundings.
It would seem we are prepared and perhaps even eager for this shift. In the last two decades, social media and short-form video content have concentrated that conditioning into a torrent — a mega composition in which every pixel screams for attention. And nearly every YouTube short, TikTok video, and Instagram Reel contains some typographic element — from rudimentary “info-tectural” framing typography, to graphic “violators,” to speech-as-text, to type-only motion graphics. Content ricochets from one outlet to another, conforming to new structures, morphing, evolving, remixing, and resurfacing. Media reshapes content for each new audience, and those audiences reciprocate with torrents of attention whenever the form and content resonate with them.
San Francisco Symphony by our partner COLLINS.
Sound sensitive typography by Kontrapunkt.
Jonathan Mak uses sound waveforms to draw letters and graphics. His work explores the relationship between our eyes and ears. What you see is what you hear.
Jonathan Mak’s Sound Type for Louis Vuitton.
Jonathan Mak’s Sound Type for Louis Vuitton.
OSESP by Polar.
The result is Fonic, an application that leverages AI to correlate and contrast typography and sound, to see sound through typography, and typography through sound.
Our future will disassemble the boundaries of expressive media and Fonic, is a baby step toward that horizon, a creative tool that pairs audio to type. We hope that breaking down the walls of media allows new methods of discovery and unexpected forms for language emerge.