37. The Cable Crawlers: How Television Animates Text

In their drive to feed the insatiable 24/7 monster, cable news channels fill their screens surrounding the central news story with an array of other features displayed in dazzling but sometimes distracting graphics. The visual inclusions (which often become incursions) consist of all or some of these elements: time, weather, sports scores, traffic, stock reports, captions, program promotion, and logos.

One constant element common to all these channels is the crawl, the running banner of news blurbs that streams across the bottom of the screen like the old stock market paper ticker tape. The feature had its electronic origins in the running headlines that wrapped around the historic New York Times building on Times Square. The newspaper has long since moved its offices to a new building, but the crawling headlines have spawned countless clones that live on in many other Times Square buildings that make up the tourist spectacle that is Broadway.

On the cable channels, the crawlers follow the way we read text in Western cultures: They enter from the right, travel across the screen, and disappear on the left. However, CNN changed its format. No longer does their text crawl; instead, it appears as a short single blurb of white text that rolls up into a black slot at the bottom of the screen and then rolls out at the top of the slot, replaced by the next text blurb. Because viewers can better take in an entire blurb in one glance than they can while having to follow the text in constant motion, the difference is easier on the eyes.

See for yourself. Look at the ticker-tape crawls on CNBC, MSNBC, and Fox News, and then look at the CNN style. The latter is much easier on the eyes.

When you use animation in your presentation, avoid the traveling options, such as Fly, Peek, Ascend, and Descend, each of which blurs the words as they enter. Instead, use the Wipe option in both Custom Animation and Slide Transition; it brings on the words the way we are accustomed to reading them in print.

Then think about how your audiences react to your graphics. Make it easy for them, and they will make it easy for you.