Visual Rhetoric: Stellar Typography
After being exposed to the Ron Paul advertisement, with its use of extreme typography and graphics, I immediately was reminded of a video I watched once. Sure, Kesha (or is it Ke$ha?) is not a fantastic musician by any stretch of the mind, BUT the person that made her music video certainly had some talent! Don't judge the music, we all know it is not any good. Take a look at the typography!
In my visual analysis, I actually like referencing Kostelnick's matrix. Here we can truly pick apart the graphic designing, text, and spacial elements to this video.
Obviously at an intra level, we can see the texts are overwhelming. The fonts are not very practical at all. Keep in mind, it is a music video, so practicality was most likely not taken into effect. I personally enjoy the different fonts and colors that come across the screen. Spatially, at points the fonts are condensed, expanded, and stretched. Overall, I did not find spacing a problem as much as I did the textual elements. Lastly, on a graphic scale, we see letters being replaced with symbols. I find this element of typography interesting. I like how "Die Young," has the sword going through it to symbolize death.
What I really want to do is analyze this video on a Supra level. The text on a supra level is dependent on the lyric. I think the flashy and hard to read text can be irritating, however, because she is also singing the lyrics, we can place an inference onto what the text is saying. Although some of you may disagree with me, I enjoy the fact that we get to play a little guessing game with the words. By this I simply mean that the text is not laid out in front of us with easy to understand graphics. We have to do a little work to get the message, and I think thats intriguing. Especially because the song is so easy to comprehend.
Graphically on a Supra level, we can see that text clashes with the intense background all the time. Is this distracting, or does it give us the ability to multitask? Is it to complex with a song, text and background pictures? Personally, I think certain points of the video are WAY to complicated, flashy and extreme for my viewing pleasures. The part I did like was the background of her singing with the lyrics on top of her. The black backdrop and hint of her in the background not only made for a cool image, but it was not hard to understand or interpret. The part I couldn't stand was when there was a complicated background with similar colored fonts on top. For instance, there is a scene with people walking in black and white with black outlined bubble letters across it! You can't even see the words.
If I was to reference the study on "Awareness of Typeface Appropriateness" (which is assigned for next week), I would agree that every different font has different characteristics. It is obvious in the fact that Kesha (ke$ha?) did not pick any normal looking fonts for her video. We do not see a Times New Roman or a Helvetica. What we get is drippy, bubbly, obnoxious fonts. Referencing the study, there are levels of appropriateness for a typeface. In any sort of business or office place letter, these types would not work at all. But this music video is not an office related piece of work. Therefore, are the fonts used in the video actually appropriate? In my opinion, 100%. What we have here is a party song with a flashy, colorful, over the top video. The fonts are crazy, the visuals are extreme, but it does appeal to a crowd, specifically a young generation. I can honestly say that the video appeals to me.
For the last part of my analysis, I scrolled way ahead in the Kostelnick readings to page 313 on pictures and the cognate strategy. As Kostelnick points out "pictures are useful to the degree that you tailor their visual language to your audience, purpose and context." I choose to use a couple of the cognate strategies here. Firstly, the Emphasis strategy. "Pictures can map mountains of info in tiny spaces, sometimes so much info that readers can get bogged down in the details and lose sight of whats important." I ask you, fellow bloggers, do you get bogged down at this video? Is there to much emphasis in making it as overwhelming as possible that we as viewers cannot even receive a clear image as to what is going on? The second cognate I wish to reference is Clarity. "Pictures have to display info that readers can understand and use." I again pose the question: Has this video achieved clarity? Is it easily predictable and easy to grasp?
My answers to these questions are: Yes, it is overwhelming. No, it is not predicable. Yes, there is heavy emphasis on EVERY aspect of this video!
HOWEVER, as I stated before, this is a music video for a song about partying to appeal to a rambunctious partying teenage crowd. So with that in mind, ask yourself again, does it actually achieve its purpose?
My answer is yes.
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