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Kinetic typography is a new field of motion graphics that uses animated words to illustrate concepts. The additional elements of time and motion provide opportunities that enrich the current advances made in expressive typography. Its primary commercial use is for titles design at the beginning of films, television commercials, and music videos. Suguru Ishizaki (1996) of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University is currently advising work on kinetic typography that illustrates a narrative without the aid of images or illustration. These are commonly either sequences of words or voiceovers with words pulled out for emphasis.

There are many rules of thumb for kinetic typography, such as the filmmaking rule of displaying text for twice the amount of time necessary to read it. However, there has been no formal experimentation to empirically conclude whether certain forms of kinetic typography are more effective in illustrating concepts.

Methods such as global movement were beyond the scope of this experiment as are many variables involved in motion such as direction and speed. We also chose not to explore emotion due to the vastness and unpredictability of the topic.

This online experiment was designed to explore the effect of kinetic type on comprehension of a text. Subjects were shown five different ambiguous sentences, each using a different kinetic principle, such as size variation and local movement. They were then asked to choose which meaning they felt was more likely. We hypothesized that having a kinetic emphasis on a specific noun would sway subjects to select that as being related to the verb.

We found that kinetic typography has the ability to sway subjects. responses to a particular answer when that answer makes logical sense. Although all sentences we used had two nouns possibly playing the active role, subjects told us that they still would have chosen the logical answer even if the other noun had been kinetically emphasized.