Lyric Videos and Kinetic Typography

When lettering sings.

What makes a good lyric video?

Lyric videos are videos that show all (or nearly all) the words that are spoken in a song while the song is playing, as if they’re closed-captioned for the hearing impaired. But the way the words are rendered is more creative than the simple white-on-black used for most closed captions.

Here’s one that was posted to YouTube last week, featuring the tune “Nothing Like Us.” The song was written by Justin Bieber and later covered by Jungkook of BTS. It’s the latter version that accompanies the animated typography and simple images here:

The video transforms some of the lyrics into anxious texts, puts others through a simple “wiggle filter” that gives them an anxious twitch, and uses their repetition. In its central image, a storm-soaked window is bracketed by the two letters in “us.” This makes the title “us” unified and divided all at once, just as they are in the song—the narrator recognizes they’ve parted, but he can’t help but think of them as a whole.

All these ideas are considered kinetic typography or motion typography, defined as letter design that changes from moment to moment.

Lyric videos are common—some are official, others are not. Often, the official videos don’t show such consistent innovation through their runtimes. There’s a school of thought that too much typographic creativity is more distracting than enriching, and producers don’t want to shift too much attention from the songs themselves.

I can see that reasoning, but the videos that do keep rolling out new typographic ideas are still my favorites. Here’s one Janice showed me when we started dating, for Weird Al Yankovic’s “Word Crimes,” with animation by Jarrett Heather: