Time-Based Design Archive of Sudent Work    |    Isabel Meirelles

Department of Art + Design, Northeastern Unviversity, Boston, MA

The first assignment begins the exploration of fundamentals of time-based design by focusing on kinetic typography. Students design and present a kinetic typographic message—a short quotation. The goal is to effectively communicate the message along time. The audience is someone in her early twenties.

Students start by selecting a quotation from a list. Examples of quotations:“It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly” (Anatole France);“The meaning of life is that it stops” (Franz Kafka); “The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple” (Oscar Wilde); “Television: chewing gum for the eyes” (Frank Lloyd Wright).

The project has two phases and two outputs. In the first phase students create a flip-book communicating the message. Then, they use the flip-book as the storyboard for the development of the movie/message (second phase). Students are encouraged to examine the semantic and rhythmic qualities of the sentence by exploring the kinetic and typographic vocabularies.

Solutions are exclusively typographic and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk is the only typeface allowed. Colors are restricted to gray scale, and if necessary, students can use one other color. Pictorial elements such as photos and drawings are not allowed. The dimensions of the flip-book are four by two inches. It should be a minimum of fifty pages and a maximum of one hundred pages. The dimensions of the movie should be 320 by 240 pixels, 30 frames/second, with a duration between twenty and thirty seconds.