You can say a lot with a picture, but for fast, sharp, can’t-miss messaging, typography rules. We’ve often said, if you don’t love type, you’re not a designer. And we’re designers who truly love type. That’s what makes working on Verizon ads a fun challenge. The brand is known for its kinetic type messaging. Punchy, stark black and white, easily read at warp speed, Verizon’s spots communicate quickly with type, strong writing and a driving music track.

We collaborated with global ad agency McCann to create spots touting the company’s blazing fast speeds—11 times faster than AT&T and 14 times faster than T-Mobile. The spots shout out Verizon’s competitive 5G advantage, and, its investment in next-generation infrastructure that ensures leadership in the future.

Verizon’s custom font, “Verizon NHG” took a lot of design cues from Helvetica—a typeface known for its superior legibility. But when you bring type to life with motion graphics in fast-moving spots, there are legibility challenges. With kinetic type, it’s crucial to find the sweet spot for readability, whether the type is expanding, shrinking, or moving in some other way. To do this, we’ve mastered animation techniques that enhance legibility, even when type has just fractions of a second on the screen: Slight movements that draw the eye, for example, or cutting type in instead of animating it. We may start a movement with the appearance of one word, and then finish the animation after a cut to the next word. Word-by-word animation and phrase-by-phrase animation are part of the kinetic type toolbox.  And to emphasize key messages, we may pop a word forward, change the background color, fill in an outlined word or use a prominent musical cue to punch things up.