Typography is constantly shifting its form according to technologies and audiences. Understanding the constant motions of typography is critical in designing forms of visual communication. In addition, current digital technologies provide novel opportunities for users to participate and co-create new typographic conventions. Online ‘fandoms’ consist of communities with interests in cultural phenomena, ranging from fan art to celebrities, to artefacts. Fandoms are an example of user-generated content with strong typographic shifts.

The practice and the teaching of Typography in South Africa has yet to undergo radical or substantive changes in light of the multiple shifts and developments in critical thinking that has taken place in Academia and contemporary visual practice in recent years. While contemporaneous thinking has “ forced a change “ in many disciplines in light of the Postmodern, Post Colonial and other “Post” posturing that challenge the dominance of Europe and the West as the centre, very little of the core imperatives of these schools of thought has found its way into the development and thinking around Typography in South Africa save a few seminal books and teachers.

It is accepted that design is moving away from static, two-dimensional outputs to multiple hybrid media which play out in four dimensions. This shift away from design as an art of composition to one of choreography “involves understanding how the conventions of typography and the dynamics between words and images change with the introduction of time, motion, and sound”(Pullman in Heller 1998:109).

Time-based media enable words to move as if living, thereby extending the expressiveness of traditional typographic language. The communicative value of time and motion as powerful and persuasive design elements must be explored and understood in order for designers to create meaningful four-dimensional design products.