billieMM

[billiemm]

Final Animation for Facebook

[billiemm]

Rationale

My approach was initially to explore the application of Roboto Slab and its origins as a typeface designed for the smartphone app Google Keep. My first concept was influenced by the user interface of Google Keep and the familiar ways in which we interact with type on a screen. It was quite a literal interpretation as it allowed me a way in to this project.

My second concept focused more on the formal aesthetic aspects of the typeface and drew inspiration from how Google itself describes and promotes this typeface. I wanted to showcase the formal elements of the typeface guided by how its designers described it.

I focused on what they describe as the ‘dual nature’ of Roboto and played these up using the contrasting black and white shapes throughout the animation. I also used some key words and phrases from this description: ‘geometric’, ‘mechanical’ and ‘friendly open curves’. These were the ideas that spoke to me the most about what Roboto Slab is like. To my thinking Roboto Slab is not an easy, soft typeface and it is not suited to all contexts. I think this is part of the reason why it tended to look odd in a lot of the colour combinations I tried. It tended to look either cartoonish or clunky. I settled on black and white as my main colour palette, accented with a ‘smartphone blue’. I felt it suited the punchiness of Roboto Slab and it helped focus on the letter forms themselves.

Black and white also speak to me of a wider context. Speaking for myself, I tend to associate white on black with a feeling of the digital world and the screen, while black on white feels more like ink on paper. This captures the contrasting ways Roboto Slab can be used but also reflects in internal tension of it - a contemporary typeface designed for a smartphone app but with qualities reminiscent of 19th and 20th century slab typefaces. At the heavier weights Roboto Slab could look like a woodblock printed poster from a hundred years ago. I enjoy that with typography there may be any number of associations that a typeface can bring up for people whether or not we are conscious of them. At first I struggled with Roboto Slab as it wasn’t clear to me where it fit. I have come to appreciate it over the course of the semester, however.

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FInal Animation for Instagram

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Final Animation

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Final Animation for Instagram

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Reflection

This was one of my first experiences animating in photoshop and it was not without its challenges. I found that while it is possible to get smooth transitions and movements using frame by frame animation, it comes at the expense of adding time to the end result. In this case fractions of seconds became very precious. It was a matter of balancing and prioritising what is being communicated. As I was learning and getting used to the process of animating I found that at first I was frustrated at how long an iteration would take to test or experiment with. This is true of my experience throughout this first year of study – when the software is new and not yet intuitive, each new idea you want to test feels like a large commitment of time and energy. This feeling has started to relent as the semester has gone on. I found that a lot of my experimentation happened later in the semester as I became more confident with the process and less anxious and making changes and ending up wasting time on something that in the end I didn’t like.

[billiemm]

I went back to one of my previous iterations as I preferred it but decided to invert the colours. I much prefer how this has turned out, especially in the ‘geometric’ and ‘mechanical’ scenes as white on black speaks to Roboto Slab’s use on screens as a web font more I think, it looks more contemporary that black on white which makes me think more of the print world. 

[billiemm]

I decided to try removing the ‘friendly open curves’ scene entirely to see if it made more sense of what I had done in the other parts as I have started to feel like they are all fighting each other. I’m not sure how much I like it though. It feels that there is too much of the typeface not being displayed now. 

[billiemm]

Because I had this kind of glitchy effect with the word mechanical, I decided to maybe bring that idea into ‘geometric’. It was starting to feel like it didn’t really make as much sense now as the way I had planned it was that the ‘gemoteric’ is almost like a title card for the scene to follow showing the angles of the different letter forms. However, as I no longer have most of this scene in the FB dimension version it wasn’t really communicating the geometry I see in Roboto Slab, apart from the fact that the letter forms relate to each other and ‘grow’ from one another. I thought that by adding some geometric shapes that the forms are based around it would communicate more effectively.

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Concept 2 Facebook Dimensions This is looking a bit better but I’m not sure that the final scene with ‘friendly open surves is really working anymore. I like how the M in mechanical transitions with the kind of glitch effect. I’m losing a bit of confidence with my ideas at this point. 

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I managed to solve the issue I was having with the text being pixelated. Turns out it was a problem with ‘anti-alias’ setting. I think it’s looking a lot better

[billiemm]

I changed the ‘nine weights’ scene as it was too hard to read and I realised I didn’t have a showcase of the numerals anywhere

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So I tried to refine this added ‘mechanical’ scene and I decided to make thingds flow a bit better I would simplify the beginning of the animation to say Roboto Slab and have the R and S as the first letters that are shown. This also helped get the run time down a bit. I’m started to worry thought that there are too many things going on here. I’m not sure. One thing that I’m struggling with is that for a lot of the frames I am using text within photoshop rather than shapes I’d brought in from illustrator. The problem is that these text layers seem to be pixelated when I render the video. When I convert the text to shapes however it messes with the movements that I’ve applied to the frames. 

[billiemm]

I decided to try and shake things up a bit for the facebook dimension version of Concept 2. I wanted to add some more descriptors from the official description of Roboto from its Google Fonts page. The key phrase I wanted to try to capture was that it has ‘a mechanical skeleton’. I tried to give this sense by making the letter forms emerge from the geometry of one another and emphasise its ‘skeleton’ by showing it in outlines with no fill.

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Concept 2 at Facebook Dimensions. 

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Concept 1 edited down to 15 seconds. Again a little tricky to balance the different factors of legibility but still showing off the typeface to its fullest and get my ideas in there.