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17 Awesome Typography Videos — FREE Assets Included

By Logan Baker

Published: March 21, 2019 Last Updated: March 20, 2019

Whether you’re new to visual storytelling or a certified expert, here are some of the most inspiring ways creators are using typography to tell stories.

In the last few years, kinetic, type-driven projects have increased in popularity, showing up in movie intros, commercials, and music videos. If you’re new to typography, animating text is much simpler than you’d think. We’ve included some tutorials throughout this post that should get you started on the right foot. These videos showcase a variety of typography techniques, both organic and digital, and represent some of the very best kinetic, type-based projects being created today!

First, lets take a look at how to animate text:

Steve Jobs

Typography uniquely animates Steve Jobs’s famous Stanford commencement address in this clean video.

29 Ways to Stay Creative

Beautiful typography and clean motion graphics elements provide the structure for this charming video on staying creative.

Animating Text Stroke

This video dives into the basics of animating text strokes in Adobe After Effects. Now, this isn’t technically typography animation, but this is a form of animation that improves your overall motion graphics if you’re using them in your video.

If you’re interested in a few more of our typography-based tutorials, check these out:

From Paper to Screen

“From Paper to Screen” showcases the history of typography in a single, entrancing video that is almost creatively overwhelming.

Rules of Fight Club

Relive the famous “Rules of Fight Club” monologue with this fan-tribute typographic video. Cool duotone design and grunge aesthetic!

Lyric Videos

One of the most popular uses for creative typography is stellar lyric videos. One of the better ones I’ve seen in a long time comes from the recent release of Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. The song is by Post Malone and Swae Lee, but the video really shines in how it presents the text as the song progresses — whether it’s clouds in the sky or spray paint on the side of buildings. There’s a reason this video has a whopping 412 million views.

Jenny Lewis

In the same vein as Spider-Man, this video of “Just One of the Guys” by Jenny Lewis is a perfect lesson in playing with form and style to create an aesthetic.

Ariana Grande

Sometimes the simpler, the better. Take Ariana Grande’s last album’s lyric video for “God Is a Woman.” The video is basically entirely stock footage with text dissolves and animations. That’s all. Yet, here it is — 95 million views later!

If you want to know how to animate titles, look no further. We recently published a tutorial by Zach Ramelan on the basics of a creating an animated title sequence.

Creative Approaches with Typography

Here are a few simpler, older looks at innovative uses of typography. From the alphabet to a monologue from The Social Network, here are some examples to inspire your own work.

The Alphabet 2

This dynamic video presents each letter of the alphabet in a unique way.

Nobody Is Smarter Than You Are

A stylized typographic video of a speech by philosopher Terence McKenna. It features a variety of typefaces and motion techniques.

A typographic representation of the “Full Attention” clip from the film, The Social Network.

Ira Glass on Storytelling

Ira Glass (NPR personality) gets the typographic treatment.

Conan O’Brien

Using audio from Conan O’Brien’s last night on The Tonight Show, this video showcases beautiful 3D typography and design.

Typophile Film Festival

This is a typography video based on the five senses. This one has no CG effects — all the effects were produced by analog means.

Free Animated Typeface

In case you don’t want to go through the trouble of animating your own text, our in-house designer and After Effects wizard, John Rodriguez, recently created this pack of FREE Neon Animated Typefaces.

This post was originally published in May, 2012. It has been updated to reflect changes in the creative community.

Cover image via Sony Pictures.

Looking for more information on motion graphics? Check out these articles.