From the course: Learning Typography for Video Editors

Convey emotion through type

From the course: Learning Typography for Video Editors

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Convey emotion through type

- [Instructor] So you can think of a typeface as clothing for text. And putting some thought behind the typeface and fonts that you choose for a project can go a long way. For instance, when looking here at the Chapter 1_4 sequence, what do you think about this stop sign? Does it scream stop to you or what you've seen in the past, which is what you're probably used to, is capital, white colored letters that appear on a stop sign, and not that of a script font. Also, just imagine for a second, a lawyer who had a comic sans font for his information. Would that convey confidence to you? Taking this another step further with a visual, here is a example of what a California license plate could look like without a lot of thought. So what we're used to, if you've ever seen the California license plate, is a script font that is very personally designed that almost also shows an elegance to it and not something that has this particular text that's in green and of a sans serif nature. Conveys a completely different message. So we want to think about typefaces and the different fonts within a typeface, again, as clothing for your words. And to put some thought behind how we put it over visuals and what type of font we use can go a long way. So to convey emotion, here's an example of that here in the timeline, where I have a rather bold font that is screaming 'overcrowded' over an image to draw attention to itself. In this treatment, I have simply scaled up the text slightly beyond the borders of the canvas or frame to really sell the idea for being overcrowded. If we take a look at this font in particular, in fact I'm just going to hop over to the graphics panel very quickly, what we can see here with the font selected in the edit tab is that this is a condensed type font. So it is meant for you to fit more words on the page and the fact that I chose the condensed font, rather than a regular font that would extend further, could also sell that idea of this city being overcrowded. We can think of adding emotion to text or other text elements by drawing attention to certain words and performing certain types of treatments, such as with this M here, where I have a series of words that appear just beside it, but try to draw attention to one in particular with an image that's slightly darkened in the background. Whatever type of project that you're working on in terms of video editing, keep in mind that when you use text to display information and to attract the eye, you convey all types of emotion with it. So put a little thought behind the type that you're using on your next video project.

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