So, the Christian Right in America is not exactly the first place you’d expect to find progressive examples of digital copywriting.. but this is pretty good isn’t it?
Not so much the words the guy is saying (which are basically wrong and morally reprehensible) but more the way they’ve been presented.
I was blown away a few months ago by Nike’s The Girl Effect which felt like it was heralding an entirely new way of writing and reading. After nearly 600 years of words being static things printed onto paper and 40 years of words being static things displayed on a computer screen, are we now arriving at the point where words can come to life?
Without wanting to get too bogged down in Semiotic Theory (it is Monday morning after all) words traditionally have been merely signifiers – artificial codes we’ve arbitrarily agreed to use as stand-ins for actual things. The letters C, A and T – for example - would make a pretty rubbish pet; you couldn’t feed them Whiskers and they wouldn’t be able to help you with a rodent infestation. When put in the right order on a page, however, they convey the idea ‘Cat’ which you then bring to life in your imagination.
The interesting thing about the piece of hectoring right-wing propaganda above, is the way it’s starting to short circuit this process. The words are alive and move around to visualise the concept they’re describing.
We posted an entry last week about The Kindle – Amazon’s new device for reading books electronically. Will the novelists of the future be both writers and designers – using text and image to create richer layers of meaning? Is the written word, as we currently know it, dead?
Or am I reading too much into this?
On a lighter note, the use of words as image is rather beautifully demonstrated in this Mercedes advert: here.
You are ready way too much into this.
It looks like a raft of (pretty good) student work that came out a couple of years ago.
Like this, for example.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNT5zvd3g2M
It’s a well defined aesthetic and this is little more than a pastiche.
1994 calling!
[...] realism is often not the best way to convey strength of emotion. Consider the dynamic text in this chilling video from the Christian Right in America, or in this animated version of the Universal Declaration of [...]