Kinetic Typography Identity

I had SO MUCH FUN doing this project. Definitely one of my favorite projects from Junior year. It was really fun to make and I am REALLY happy with how it came out. This project made me actually like after effects animation (which I previously despised). It was really fun to make a project about something that I was actually super interested in and really helped motivate me through this project.

I decided to make my project on New York Fashion Week. I really love fashion so this seemed like the perfect event for me to rebrand.

The original NYFW branding was pretty simple, standard, and about what I was expecting from them. It was actually really hard to find branding materials from them, this was about all I could find. I feel like a lot of fashion designers make their own advertisements for their specific shows.

I knew I wanted to take the identity in a pretty different direction. My inspiration was to do a grunge rebrand of NYFW. New York’s fashion week is already much more focused on ready-to-wear and streetwear design than the European fashion weeks, which focus more on haute couture and evening wear. Because of this I decided to go for a more raw and grungy look for New York, which I think reflects the personality of the city better.

Maybe controversial, but for the color palette I chose only black and white. I did this because the original branding was all in black and white, and also since I was inspired by grunge, halftone printing, and all that I thought black and white only was a natural choice.

I played around with a LOT of different “rough” typefaces, but I ended up settling on Neuzon. I liked how it was simple but still had the grungy feel. I also liked how it looks pretty standard but like the baselines were not all the same, the letters are a little tilted and things like that. I felt this typeface was just enough.

I was definitely inspired by things like silkscreen printmaking and like grungy printing so I decided to use a lot of ink motifs as well as halftone treatment for images.

For my wordmark I wanted to keep the layout of the original wordmark and I imagined in my head the four letters spreading out into the full title, so that’s what I did! Again like I mentioned in my blog post for reflective type I like to plan EVERYTHING so I made everything in illustrator first (which made it super easy to animate) including templates for the animated posters.

The animation went really well, just very time consuming, but this project really helped me get the hang of after effects. The only thing that really frustrated me was I still cannot figure out how to do some things in after effects. I want to be able to adjust timing subtly after all the animation is completed but I can’t figure out how to do that without moving all the keyframes and layers that come after what you are trying to change, so I left some of the timings that I wish I could have altered a bit.

Also I used the roto brush tool for the first time to make the silhouettes of the legs walking and it just would NOT work. I spent like 12+ hours trying to make it work (the propagating and freezing takes FOREVER) and it still just would NOT work. That’s why the leg silhouette in the reel looks a bit shaky. I had originally wanted the leg silhouette moving on top of the halftone legs moving for the screen animations but I just couldn’t make it work.

Overall I had a SUPER great time making this project and I really hope everyone likes it because I personally am REALLY happy with how it turned out (the most important thing :)).