What motivates you as a designer? What are your principles, beliefs, and intentions guiding your design practice? In this studio you will explore, research and create a design manifesto that will form the framework for a kinetic typographic motion graphics piece.

As a collective you will discover fomulate and establish your design ethos and aspirations, and explore what guides your creative process whilst developing skills in bringing type to life through digital and anologe animation techniques.

This course delves below the surface aesthetics and together we will discover the core beliefs and values that drive our work whilst engaging with the wider design discourse. 

This studio is for students interested in looking to gain new skills through time-based, motion graphics with a focus on kinetic type developed within a philosophical framework.

Through a series of immersive class tutorials, we will explore a diverse array of design manifestos from various cultural sources. Our aim is to understand how to effectively communicate a designer's ethos in written form, while considering the principles and guidelines that shape the design process, decision-making, and practice. You will discover and refine your core beliefs in areas such as sustainability, innovation, social responsibility, and aesthetic principles.

Simultaneously, we will delve into the exciting world of motion graphics, with a particular focus on kinetic typography. Through inspiring case studies, both historical and contemporary, you will learn the fundamentals of animation. This includes techniques for animating text to enhance readability and visual impact, understanding type hierarchy, and exploring the relationship between typography and visual storytelling, how sound design relates to the moving image, along with essential narrative techniques.

This studio emphasises expressing your values as a designer, both individually and collectively, and how to convey these to a broader audience through written and visual communication. You will create a manifesto that captures these values, culminating in a fully realised animation.

Through research and experimentation in practical animation workshops, you will extend your design skills from static style-frames to fully animated motion graphics. These workshops will cover both digital and analogue techniques, including stop motion animation, in-camera methods, and digital animation software such as After Effects.

Structured to mimic a professional motion studio, this course will teach you pre and post-production workflows, the impact of time-based media on the design process, and best practices for creating moving images for screen-based outcomes.

Throughout the semester, you will be guided through the moving image creation workflow in a series of key stages. The collective creation of the manifesto will serve as a "script," informing the visuals and narrative of your animation. You will develop a series of storyboards and style-frames that will act as a blueprint for the animated manifesto. These style-frames will be brought to life using in-camera analogue filmmaking techniques and basic After Effects skills.      

The final outcome will be a fully realised, audiovisual motion graphics film, ready for distribution and screening to a wider audience. The aim of this studio is to expand your design skills and transpose them into a motion design context.

Brief 1: Manifesto script

Brief 2: Storyboards and Style-frames

Brief 3: Final motion graphic