Motion Graphics Ergonomics: Animated Semantic System, for Typographical Communication Efficiency

Abstract When a designer creates a communication project or object, he understands that the written text is just a part of the message. All the graphical decisions about placement, typography, color, materials, all have profound influence in the connotation and denotation aspects of the message. For better efficiency of communication, the designer must dominate these elements and have a methodology to guaranty the efficiency of communication. Movement is particularly versatile in terms of message manipulation and composition. This is very clear in practices like ballet, where the dancer uses just movement to communicate entire messages, stories and feeling. Here we intend to understand the practice of the motion designer relating it with to choreographer. This paper takes in consideration the lack of any epistemology associating communication design to the new information technologies and other complemental fields, while underscoring the need for a scientific approach to the study of elements that structure graphism when applied to communication in movement. This paper sets out primarily to establish a method to be used as a functional grammar to be applied to communication design. Here we will present the results of a PhD research that applied a qualitative-based mixed methodology, looking at the subject from two different angles: a theoretical contextualisation, the outcome of a literary critique encompassing various areas of knowledge that are specific or complemental to communication design: semiotics, visual perception, typography and digital supports; a collection and selection of movement variables, enhanced with a study of relevant cases. With this, we can understand the semantic effect of movement as applied to digital typography, how to manipulate it to fulfil an objective and use motion graphics and animation to communicate a message with better efficiency than with another medium.