Barış Ati̇keR

Beykent University, Barış Atiker is an Associate Professor in the Department of

Istanbul, Turkey Graphic Design at Beykent University, TURKEY.

www.barisatiker.com/9078
He completed his proficiency in arts and his postgraduate
studies at Hacettepe University of Ankara. His research in-
terests lie in the area of motion design ranging from theory
Lectures 111

Biography 111
to design to implementation, with a focus on stop motion
animation technique and motion typography. In recent
years he has focused on better techniques for expressing,
analyzing and executing digital and analog experiments for
type in motion.

He has served on roughly twenty conference and work-

shop program committees and he has organized several
international Stop Motion Typography workshops in Turkey
and Poland. Baris has taught a popular Motion Typogra-
phy, Interaction Design, 2D/3D Animation and Design Project
Management courses on undergraduate and postgraduate
topics.

Baris has received several international awards for his

professional design career. In his never-ending spare time,
Baris enjoys playing guitar, dancing Argentina Tango and
making short films. Baris also runs a blog called 9078 with
tutorials and interviews with successful talents in Turkey.
 Figure 1: Dancing Neon
Sign in Nowy Świat Street.
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Atiker 111
Type has never been ‘static’. Yet we are the designers to
show the motion of type and make it look alive. You can see
one of the most beautiful neon signs in Warsaw still hang-
ing over a former restaurant and jazz club, Club Melodia
in Nowy Świat Street (fig. 1), which was built in 1962. Its
dirty and broken appearance cannot hide the real beau-
ty of a neon dancing lettering with a star once it was so
brand new and shiny when first installed over the roof. So
if we had a chance to take a picture of it from the same spot
everyday until now, we could have this spectacular life of
a neon sign as a moving image of type as it gets older every
single frame.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/osiatynska/2273627005/
 Jessica Helfand has already stated that our definitions of
type increasingly imperiled. We accept that the written lan-
guage has strong effects on today’s visual communication,
yet we are much more involved with type in motion from
smart phone screens to huge video mapping installations
thanks to the technological advancements in comparison
to the past. And now we are still discovering new bounda-
ries of type in motion in each development of a new tech-
nological device such as electronic paper or holographic
visualizations.
Figure 2: Arabic and Ro-
man lettering as the face
So we always feel the need of finding the perfect name for of a language and culture.
type in motion to define these new boundaries as best as we
can. There have been so many definitions like motion, kinet-
ic, fluid, scrolling, dynamic typography for type in motion
made by designers and theorists such as Barbara Brownie
and Y. Y. Wong before, so I’d like to explore the concepts
and reasons behind those definitions by looking through
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Atiker 111
the existence of type in motion.

Alive

Here I like to consider type is like human as it arises, grows,

matures and finally dies. And can we go forward by com-
paring life of the type to life of human being since it has
a face too (the typeface)?

The face of the type can be like the face of a language,

where the strokes of Arabic calligraphy resembling the
frequency of sound with high accents coming out from hu-
man throat. Or the type can be a face of a culture, where
the perfectly carved letters on Trajan Columns of Rome in
1st century still exist in the facades of statehouses as a sign
of democracy. (fig. 2)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trajan_inscription_duotone.jpg

Figure 3: The opening
111
credits with static typogra-
phy for Enter The Void by
Tom Kan (2009).
http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/enter-the-void/
Motion and Speed
In physics ‘motion’ is the action or process of moving,
changing place or position within time. To understand the
type in motion, the first thing we need to look at is the
speed of its motion.
The motion of type in a neon sign or the Trajan columns
I stated before is not visible to the viewers eye, as it took
years for type to get rusted, broken, out of order or wiped
up in decades or even thousand years. But the motion of
type will continue until the letters fade away completely.
As a contrary example, the opening credit designed by Tom
Kan for Gaspar Noe’s Enter The Void (2009) hit us like a ton
of bricks due to the vivid images of the ‘static’ typographic
Atiker 111
compositions from other movies to be arranged as credits,
and the fast motion transitions of the titles give a little bit
of pain to viewers eyes while trying to read and follow the
whole piece. (fig. 3)
Whether the speed of motion is slow or fast, I believe every
typographic element is moving towards a different state
since they are built. But to accept an old rusting neon sign
as motion graphics, first we need to record the change and
make it visible through the motion pictures.
 Changing Identity and Behaviors

In most of the graphic animations, motion comes with Figure 4: CGI Tattoo Ink
changes in opacity, rotation, position or scale properties. as opening credits of
Thus Adobe’s After Effects has an interface that uses those The Girl with Dragon
Tattoo by Blur (2011).
properties to control the changes of the type layers during
animation in time.

But those properties are not enough to describe what’s

underneath with the change of type, as Woolman and Bel-
latoni state that typography moves, transforms, mutates,
duplicates, blurs and interacts.

Within those changes, we are not only discussing the prop-

erties but also understanding the behavior and identity of
type. Behavior can be described as the actions or inactions http://foundationportfolio1211.blogspot.com.tr/2012/04/title-sequenceanalysis-jack.html
Lectures 111

of type to internal or external stimuli. In a digital world of

production, type can be in a relationship with any materi-

Atiker
als like fluids and particles, so it’s really challenging for
designers to define the behaviors of type in motion. (fig. 4)
Figure 5: Title from
real Bamboo sticks in
Along with the change of behavior, type in motion starts to Keeping A Diary by Stefan
Sagmeister (2008).
express an identity, which is the form of expressive qualities
and significance. Since there are so many different typefac-
es, what differs them from each other is not only the static
forms but also the identity of type due to its motion in time.

Like we see in movies, actors always change identities and

behaviors based on the scripts. So type can be an actor too,
playing the lead role in the moving picture, and express the
messages by unique appearances. (fig. 5)

http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2010/10/dzn_Stefan_Sagmeister_at_Vienna_Design_Week-10.jpg
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-cvuvQJ8WQ
Lectures 111
Kinetic Transformation
As a physical term, kinetic is an effect due to the motion of
the object, which we consider here as type. Hillner defines
the kinetic type as text that moves in relation to screen
dimensions or objects in relation to each other.
But type not only moves but also transforms into other
shapes as single or multiple forms. This inversed motion
piece by Myles (fig. 6) is a good example of type’s conceptu-
al transformation both in forms and in materials, from ice
to water while melting action is both literally and visually
expressed.
http://paigeandleah.blogspot.com.tr/2012/10/analysis-of-opening-titlesequence-of.html
Atiker 111
Temporal
Figure 6: Experimental Everything related to time is temporal and this rule applies Figure 7: The opening
Typography work Melting to type in motion as well. Type in motion has a time re- credits for Se7en
by Myles (2013). striction for appearance, which affects its visibility, legibility, by Kyle Cooper.
and of course the meaning.
As a rule-breaking example, in Kyle Cooper’s famous open-
ing credits for the film Se7en (fig. 7), the temporality of text
is aesthetically and conceptually mixed due to the content
of the sequence and analog styled experiments in a digi-
tal production workflow. We do not need to read the titles
anymore, because what we see is not a text on the moving
image, but the text ‘in’ the moving image that is always
temporal.
 Fluid Transition

The transition of type in motion does not have to be only oc-

curring between different forms but also between different
identities. As I am comparing the type as an actor, changing
the identity of the type in motion creates different stories
to tell. An interesting pop up book project named ABC3D
by Marion Batallie (fig. 8), is a clear example of type for
changing identities, while the alphabet letters effect each
other by turning each page of the book.

In his very famous speech, a martial arts star and actor

Bruce Lee suggests to be shapeless like water and to adapt
new forms due to the new boundaries. Eduardo Kac says http://creativeandlive.com/archives/2008/06/05/marion-bataille
that the fluid type is escaping from the constancy of mean-
ing a printed sign would have such as thinking of type as
shapeless and fitting the form of the message it gives and
Lectures 111

then it changes within the meaning itself. Figure 8: ABC3D by Marion

Batallie.

Atiker
In opening credits for the famous TV series Dexter (fig. 9),
the title represents the blood washed out from bold letters
of the crime scene, where the fluid type expresses the met- Figure 9: Opening credits
aphorical relationship between the crime scene theme and for Dexter by Digital Kitch-
name of the main character. It perfectly fits the fluid idea en (2006).
in both visual and conceptual expression.

The formless fluid type can be seen as metamorphose so

without a constant shape it makes perfect abstraction of the
meaning. The meaning is also alive with type in motion so
it is not constant, repeated or just forgotten.
http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/dexter/
 Screen and Perspective

While searching for the meaning, we need to go further by
exploring also the screen medium where the motion of type
occurs. We can clearly say that the screen only limits the
perception of type in motion whether it’s a TV monitor, a cell
phone interface or a video-mapping installation art on the
facades of large scale buildings, the flat representation of
moving letters were limited to the dimensions and resolu-
tions of the screen itself.
But today we are developing new technologies to break the
limited resolution boundaries. The projection of moving
type is not any more limited to the constant size and posi-
tions of the screens, and now we have both moving type on
Lectures 111
An experimental work named Box by The Creators Project
(fig. 10) has already been a clear manifesto for the limitless
screens where robotics and motion tracking technologies
are a part of the projection mapping visualization. Box ex-
plores the synthesis of real and digital space through pro-
jection mapping on moving surfaces.
Along with new boundaries such as dimensions and inter-
action, type in motion has much more become virtual and
a new link to the content. Type in motion is not only a car-
Figure 10: Box by The rier for the message anymore, but it becomes the message
Creators Project (2013). itself as once McLuhan said: medium is the message.

Atiker 111
moving screens with resolution-free dimensions.

The free movement of all elements constituting the type

in motion creates a conceptual volume because the screen
is not flat anymore. So if the screens become three dimen-
sional, we need to talk about perspective sense in type in
motion. For hundreds of years perspective was a reference
to reality, but now these rules are inversed and the vir-
tual becomes the new perspective due to the interaction
between the spectator and the type in motion on dynamic
screen. Now the eye is fooled by a false representation of
perspective but only looking right from the place where you
are looking at. So everything moves from type to screen and
projector to spectator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX6JcybgDFo
 In-Between and Navigation

As we understand the transition from static to dynamic

content, with the layout has all the possible arrangements
of type in motion. Woolman and Bellatoni state that let-
terforms that are the symbols of language and communi-
cation become insufficient through the separation of letter
and form. As in cel animation technique, In-Between is
an appropriate term for this situation since the transition
never ends and type is always appearing as in between of
a change.

Type in motion is responsive to the interaction between the

message and the eye. Sometimes it may be more playful
than understanding the message it is linked to. The mes-
sage is delivered through a journey of type in motion where https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IALr6M2NXsE

it navigates us to the whole story. Thus navigation is impor-

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Atiker 111
tant in delivering the message through the senses and it is Figure 11: Interactive In Enra’s interactive dance installation (fig. 11), the harmony
never one-way direction. Dance Installation of digital graphic elements such as paint brushes, geomet-
Primitive by Enra (2013). ric shapes, 3 dimensional structures with real life dancers
in perfect synronization with eachother. The sound is also
Rhythm and Sound a strong bond between the computer generated imagery
and real life elements.

While the change is continuous and choreographic, we can

say the rhythm of a presentation alters the meaning a lot.
Whether it is slow or fast, the rhythm keeps all the moving
elements in one piece with synchronization in itself. Like
the ballet dancers on a stage or a running athlete on track,
our eyes want to see the beauty of synchronization between
moving elements.
Sound is the second sense coming to mind to set ther-
hythm when we think about audio-visual communication.
Of course sound not only completes the meaning of the
visual but also tells more about the invisible.
As a result, I have discussed concepts such as motion, kinet-
ic, fluid, temporal, screen, virtual, dynamic and etc. to de-
fine the properties of type in motion, I was searching for the
‘one’ word perfectly fitting all these concepts stated above.
But by defining all the properties we associate with type in
motion, we unwittingly set ourselves barriers to stop think-
ing about beyond those definitions. Type is and always be
in motion, in evolution and in life so what we need to focus
more are the new possibilities and challenges of type in
motion, rather than just trying to immobilize it with a per-
fect ‘name’.