Can typography dance? Ever since moving pictures got sound (and even before), motion designers have been combining letters and sound to great effect. But with today’s technology, typography can move more musically than ever: variable fonts can shapeshift in time with drums; color fonts can shift hue to match harmony.

But how, exactly, do you choreograph that kind of thing? In a desktop app, combining typography with musical data can be complex and cumbersome — or sometimes impossible. In code, where anything’s possible, it’s easy to get lost in the endless possibilities and neverending installation headaches. What if there was a programming library that made it easy to experiment with typography and sound?

Enter Coldtype: a cross-platform Python library that makes it possible to write complex typographical animations in real-time.

And that’s exactly what participants will learn in this class: how to use Python and Coldtype to combine typography and sound in two and three dimensions (with the help of Blender). Participants will also get to know Coldtype’s alternative approach to programming, an “unpythonic” idiom heavily influenced by functional programming. (If you’ve only iterated with for loops and wondered if there’s another way, this is the class for you.)

Each session will center on an example of type + sound — some from film, some from the instructor’s own work using Coldtype — and by the end of the 10 classes, you’ll learn how to think about type and sound differently, and you’ll come away with multiple musical typographic animations of your very own.

Requirements

• A computer with a good internet connection (Coldtype runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows)
• Previous programming experience*, or at least a willingness to spend some (or a lot) of time in a terminal.

* While it might be possible to learn a lot in this class without previous programming experience, part of Coldtype’s appeal is that it integrates easily with the wider Python programming ecosystem, i.e. Coldtype is not a self-contained app for learning, it’s a toolkit for professional design work. As such, the learning curve might be quite steep for participants completely new to programming.

Registration will open on January 2, 2025.