There’s something infinitely beautiful about graphics in motion. The poetry of the movement infuses static visuals with new life,  reflecting the culture we live in. Below is a sampling of the best out there in contemporary motion graphics and the visual themes they share.

Theme: 1960s Nostalgia

Echoing a time when Saul Bass was the master of his medium, the 60s inspired opening credits for Mad Men, bring the classic era of title design into contemporary perspective.  Creative Directors Steve Fuller and Mark Gardner talk about the process for creating this instant classic for Imaginary Forces.

Kyle Cooper's iconic studio, became legendary after creating the title sequence for the movie Se7en in the late nineties.  Influenced in great part by his teacher and mentor Paul Rand, Cooper’s title sequences continue to inspire wild praise from artist and audiences alike. It was Rand who once said “…a work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable�.  Rand too, was a product of the optimism and adventurous spirit of the 50s and 60s.

Is it the economic climate that makes us long for a bygone era? Or the current digital revolution that makes us nostalgic for the golden age of space travel? Whatever the reason, this throwback style is here to stay.

Theme: Amorphous Liquid

Liquid seems to be a favorite theme of motion designers in recent days, echoing the trend in photography toward the capture of liquid forms, as with water droplet photography.

This piece from Psyop created for Fage Yogurt is a perfect example of this trend and the interplay of art, poetry and brand. The folks at Psyop have the rare ability to play at the intersection of creativity and commerce, creating commercial work with the nuance and fluidity of painting.  Their work transcends the limitations of the tool and pushes the industry to new horizons.

 Theme:  Illustration and Street Art

Illustration in motion is nothing new, but with an increasing trend toward natural themes and the continued evolution of the medium, there is a push to include the flaws that evidence the artist’s hand in the forms generated by animators and 3D artists alike.

In this vain, Umeric’s work is highly illustrative and imaginative. If street art could jump off the walls and bounce around, this is what it would look like. 

 

Theme: Natural Forms and Alien Organisms

There is something inherently beautiful in natural forms.  Think of the nautilus or ivy.  So, it’s no surprise that designers draw from these forms to alien proportions in motion design, especially as algorithmic animation techniques continue to allow artists to quickly render organic randomness in animated forms.   The flora and fauna of Avatar’s Pandora may have magnified this trend and while her sanity may be questioned, even Bjork leveraged the beauty of hair in past and recent work. Similarly, technology and nature merge in the work of Ayhan Cebe and others in the above examples of visual yum yum inspired by nature. 

Developed by Moritz Stefaner and Christopher Warnow, the application runs on a semi-public multi-touch screen, which displays a network graph of the relationships between all relevant organizations, an accompanying world map, plus various bar graphs that reveal other facts and important statistics. The data is gathered from analyzing the co-authorship connections detected in the 94,000 publications that were produced over the last 10 years.

For the network graph, the relative size of an institute's icon represents the number of scientific publications, and the width of the connecting lines reflects the number of jointly published papers between 2 separate institutes.

You’ve read the inspirational posts on Hacker News. You’ve purchased the recommended books. You’ve bookmarked the online tutorials. You even plopped down $80 on a set of instructional videos, promising yourself that the investment would only make you more motivated. And for some reason, you still don’t know how to program.

Codecademy, a new site that went live earlier this evening, might just be the answer.

It’s a web-based, interactive programming tutorial that holds your hand and walks you through the basics of JavaScript. At this point it’s just getting started — the lessons only go as far as ‘While’ loops — but it clearly has loads of potential for one key reason: it actually feels fun.

Codecademy’s initial signup process is very clever: there isn’t one, at least at first. As soon as you land on Codecademy.com you’ll be prompted to complete the first lesson, which involves printing out and finding the length (in letters) of your name. It isn’t until you’ve made it through a few lessons that the site prompts you to create a user account, when it reminds you that if you don’t register, all of your progress will be lost. At which point you’ll probably register.

The lessons themselves are pretty straightforward. A sidebar on the left hand side of the screen will instruct you to complete a task, like, say, create a new variable called ‘myName’. You edit code using the web-based terminal, hit return, and your code is executed. The site hits a good balance between telling you exactly what to do, and prompting you to reuse something you learned in a previous lesson, so it doesn’t feel frustratingly difficult or boring.

As you progress through the lessons, you’ll rack up points and trophies, which are displayed on your profile. Friends can check out your profile to see how you’re progressing, and it isn’t hard to imagine the site building out additional social features, like leaderboards and competitions.

The application still has some bugs, which isn’t all that surprising — the company’s cofounders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski say that they started working on the app only a week and a half ago. In fact, they weren’t ready for the site to get so much attention so quickly (they posted it on Hacker News hoping for some initial feedback, and had 1,000 concurrent users within a few hours).

And there are still plenty of questions. The founders aren’t sure if they’re going to let the community create new lessons, and their monetization plans aren’t set in stone (though they do plan to make money). But they’re off to a solid start.

I just wish the first lesson included the words ‘Hello World’.

EES packs circuits into temporary tattoos, makes medical diagnostics fashionable originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Aug 2011 23:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

EES packs circuits into temporary tattoos, makes medical diagnostics fashionable originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Aug 2011 23:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.