Kint — A Kinetic Typography app

A Kinetic Typography app seemed like a daring idea when we talked about it first. We were met with quizzical looks, when we tried explaining what it was about. Most of us, have seen animated text in video ads, music videos or explainer videos but the term ‘Kinetic Typography’ was relatively unheard of. To us, the idea was both exotic and risky. We were aspiring to create an app, that could create videos as good as the one that you see below. (We love what Ira Glass has to say in this video, too.)

Or as awesome as Weird Al Yankovic’s newest hit, Word Crimes.

Well, to create a design app for tablets (and mobiles) is indeed challenging.

We wanted to give a fresh lease of life to words, make it pop out of the screen, stretch it, warp it, waltz it around with the music, step in tandem with the voiceover and stitch it all together with an elegant storyboard.

We wanted to make making videos easier.

We wanted to challenge the current reality that requires us to master the exacting art of Adobe After Effects and Cinema 4D to create videos with animated text. And that made us think.

• Can we create these videos without months of learning a tool?
• Can we shorten this process? Probably, we could make videos within hours, not days.
• Can we make it easier with a better workflow? One that is more intuitive and does not involve painful sliders and a litter of controls.

These are the questions that lie at the core of Kint and guide us in our journey for building it.

One of the core aspects of Kint is to render text flawlessly. We had to make our text rendering, pixel perfect. No jagged lines or coarse curves. Of course, there are a lot of existing solutions available for rendering. But we couldn’t go with it, as either they are vendor-specific or do not offer the fine grain control that we need. So, Beziers became our best friend. And we took a deep plunge into the sea of mathematical splines and curves (Beziers, B Splines and NURBs), only to resurface after a few months with a solid solution to render text.

Today, we have moved on to our next challenge. To animate text. And we are making good progress! You can definitely hear about it, next month.

Originally published at blog.kint.io.