Adobe After Effects – Kinetic Type

Kinetic Type is a method that combines animation with type to create a visual type effect designed to stimulate certain emotions in its viewers. Its the type look that wraps itself from one side of the screen to the other or pops across the screen in short slow bursts. Once you understand how it works in After Effects the design combinations are incalculable. 

A Brief History of Kinetic Type

Most think kinetic type came to be on modern day computer screens but thats not actually the case. Did you know that it can actually be traced back to 1899.

• A World First: Méliès is credited with the first-ever use of moving text in his advertising work.
• The Technique: To achieve this, he used stop-motion animation. In an 1898–1899 advertisement, he animated children’s alphabet blocks to assemble themselves, creating the illusion of inanimate objects moving by their own power.

Below is quoted directly from Wiki 

With the advent of film and graphic animation, the possibility of matching text and motion emerged. Examples of animated letter-forms appeared as early as 1899 in the advertising work of George Melies. Early feature films contained temporal typography, but this was largely static text, presented sequentially and subjected to cinematic transitions.

It was not until the 1960s that opening titles began to feature typography that was truly kinetic. Scholars recognize the first feature film to extensively use kinetic typography as Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959).This film’s opening title sequence—created by Saul Bass—contained animated text, featuring credits that “flew” in from off-screen, and finally faded out into the film itself. A similar technique was also employed by Bass in Psycho (1960).

Since then, the use of kinetic typography has become commonplace in film introductory titles and television advertisements. More recently, it has been a central feature of numerous television idents, notably Martin Lambie Nairn’s first ident for the British Channel 4 television network in use from 1982.

Read more over at Wiki