The rise of stretched text: nostalgia and motion design

Anyone with formal training in graphic design will tell you never to manually scale a piece of text. “If you want it wider, use the extended version,” they’ll say. But knowing rules empowers us to break them—and today, that rebellious streak is exactly what defines many motion design trends. As long as you know what you’re doing, stretched text has become a crucial part of the modern motion designer’s bag of tricks.

Why is stretched text so popular, and what has caused its rise? Our theory is that this font trend harks back an unintentional element of 90s design. Back then, the novelty of desktop publishing enabled anyone with a home computer to innocently stretch and skew letters across party invitations, flyers, and lost cat posters. We subconsciously store these offensive memories, and over time, they evolve into something that we want to see again because that old hatred is now nostalgia. And we push this stretching and warping past its limits until it gains a life of its own, which we now embrace. 

We’ve been seeing stretched text in animation and design for several years now. An early example is the Playgrounds Festival opener from 2020.

An earlier influence we can’t ignore is the Saul Bass-esque title sequence for the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Catch Me If You Can, in which the ascenders and descenders of most letters were stretched beyond the top and/or bottom of the screen.

Wherever it came from, stretched text has become a chameleon of modern design and motion, finding its way into all styles from Y2K neon collage to slick, elite sports aesthetics—including playful design languages like the emerging squishy 3D trend, which blends stretch, texture, and bounce in bold, tactile forms.

We’re discussing any text in graphic design and/or motion design where parts of the copy have been elongated for effect. This can include elongating part of a word or letter, e.g., stretching the arms of an E or L, or stretching and distorting the overall frame-shape of a word, letter, or block of type. In graphic design, it gives a sense of movement. In motion design, it not only draws the eye but also provides a chance to individually emphasize parts of a phrase.

When it comes to motion design, there are two main techniques for animating stretched text:

Corner pinning is precisely what it sounds like. You chop part or all of a word into rectangular sections and then apply an effect to distort the sections by animating the coordinates of the corners where the sections meet.

In elongated sectioning, you break the text into letters, sometimes converting them to vectors and separating them further, with different parts on separate layers. Then, you can stretch the legs, arms, and ascenders while leaving the loops, tails, and crossbars unaltered. This effect can evoke the elongations we might see through glass refraction, and it’s even been used in conjunction with other “real-life” distortions to double down on the emotive movement (as shown below).

An honorable mention goes to a third technique, scarcely used in motion design (mainly because After Effects doesn’t support it without additional scripts): the use of variable fonts.

These unique fonts can be configured with weights, italics, and variations. You can use variable fonts with design applications like Photoshop and Illustrator. In programs like Figma or the Cavalry app, it’s possible to keyframe between a narrow font version and an extended version, often giving an unexpectedly interesting effect.

If you ask a graphic design purist, this is probably the best method, but it’s a little limited in overall visual stretchiness.

There is also an After Effects plugin called Stretch-it. It has some useful abilities, but be careful where you place your stretch points. Even in the promo for the effect, there’s some distortion of characters, which your art director will likely reject.

While these techniques all sound very freeing and fun, we’re not endorsing designers to go stretching fonts with wild abandon without understanding why it can be seen as a faux pas. You must understand typographical rules before you break them. This video will help:

Quality type is painstakingly designed to feel right and balanced. Letters are weird things when you look at them for long enough, with their loops, arms, serifs, and counters. Typographers weigh up the width and weight of every element to enable us to read text without even thinking about the letters. And here we are, stretching out E’s and F’s, or lord forbid, R’s? It’s actual pandemonium.

As designers, we must tread a fine line between preservation and destruction when stretching text.  Can we preserve the weight of an ascender while stretching an arm? Can we keep the line width of an O while stretching it to the length of an outdoor billboard? Should we do these things? As with most things “design”, it depends on the job.

Feeling inspired? Dive into the stretchy text motion design trend with our recent tutorial on stretchy text in After Effects and our more in-depth free course on YouTube: Kinetic Typography in After Effects.

You can also check out our dedicated kinetic typography article to learn more.