Wednesday 20 November 2013

Bring your content to life with Kinetic Text

Kinetic Typography Header Image


Kinetic typography, perhaps more simply defined as ‘moving text’, is an animation technique that fuses text and motion. Increasingly present in popular culture, kinetic text is a dynamic, engaging way to bring ideas to life and is perhaps an appropriate tool for your business…
First coming to prominence in Hitchcock’s enticing title sequences of the 60’s, kinetic text takes a standard, un-inspiring bulk of text and, through movement and graphic style, transforms it to better portray the information.

Reading a large chunk of text can become incredibly dull and monotonous for any audience. With kinetic text animations this copy is brought to life and emphasised through variation in font, size, colour, motion, angles, shapes etc. Key messages can be enhanced in the layout and timing of the piece, whilst iconography and graphics can create visual metaphors to support them further.
This great piece on procrastination is a fantastic example of engaging text and illustrates exactly how specific sections can be highlighted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ2T4-rUUcs#t=110

A very current style in the design world, kinetic text is often supported by narration, or created directly from narration (as in the video above). This works incredibly well as this form of visual communication can really add to the voice. Subtle movements and visual motifs can paint a picture of whose voice the audience is hearing and therefore – as with every presentation – a good script is essential.

This video encapsulates two different ‘voices’ and shows how their individual personalities can be reflected through animation and visual style.

http://vimeo.com/50085266

Kinetic text captures audience attention and manipulates it to key areas, becoming far more memorable than block text. This is perhaps why many organisations now have ‘Who We Are’ text animations that help sum them up as a business. More personal than a couple of bullet-pointed slides and unique to their ‘voice,’ these animations can provide a great overview that is both interesting and informative. A gardening business, for example, could feature their text growing from shoots, floating down on leaves, or being trimmed by a mower: there are endless possibilities to be creative with text and this is perhaps why this creative trend may be around for a while yet; we even made one for ourselves.

Tuesday 12 November 2013

Microsoft’s Answer to Presenting on the iPad – SkyDrive & WebApps


We have discussed presentations for business using an iPad previously. Today we’ll be looking at Microsoft’s offering, SkyDrive & WebApps in more depth.

Microsoft has recently released their Office app for the iPhone and latest iPod touch only. Their reasoning behind this is that SkyDrive & Web Apps are already available for the iPad. These work through the web browser on the iPad where you can access and edit your Office files online.

Unfortunately, we found that there are some irritating issues which regrettably let the service down; slideshows didn’t display in full screen (pinching to zoom in on them ended up with horrible pixilation of the presentation) and as the presentations are stored in the cloud, when we turned off the internet connection we were surprised to find that whilst the presentation still played fine the video content did not.

Ease of use: SkyDrive is very simple to use and many businesses will be using it (or at least SharePoint which works in a similar way) already. The web apps run Office software directly from SkyDrive in your browser with a simple click.

Cost: SkyDrive & WebApps is free. All that is required is a Microsoft logon which again, costs nothing to create.

Final thoughts: Considering this is from Microsoft, we were disappointed with the issues we encountered and really wish Microsoft would just release an official app for the iPad. The iPhone/iPod app is currently free if you are paying for the subscription based Office 2013 service. We think they would get a lot more subscribers if they offered the same app and scheme on the iPad.