Design Hero Animation

I started out by finding sound clips. While James Edmondson does have a podcast, after listening to a few episodes I realized that most of his podcast was actually his guests speaking. So instead, I went out and found a few episodes of other podcasts where he was the guest, in addition to a few lectures he’s given at various conferences.

I decided to go with this quote, from his episode of Making Ways: The Art of Music, which is a podcast hosted by illustrator Rob Goodman.

“I hope now that I can challenge people to be a little bit more deliberate in their type choices, you know, and kinda get people into slightly uncomfortable areas. We’re coming out of a trend right now that’s very sterile and geometric and I hope where it goes from here just blows the doors off everything and people just start going wild again… I think what I want my legacy to be… I hope that people understand that typefaces come from people, and the people that are involved in it are doing it because they really love it. So because of that you can find really amazing stuff if you start digging. There’s no shortage of it. I’m not really contributing anything meaningful to with world with this tiny drop of weird typefaces, but for me it feels like it gives my life purpose…. I hope I’m remembered for pushing some typographic boundaries.”

I made this storyboard to correspond to it.

Monday, April 4

After talking to Brett as well as a few classmates about my audio, I decided to revise and restructure it a little. I also added music. I went with the song “Prom” by Vulfpeck—Edmondson has done a lot of work with them, so I thought it would be fun to use their music, and “Prom” specifically has a nice beat and variation that will lend itself well to animation.

With my updated voiceover (from the podcast episode mentioned earlier as well as some taken from his Typographics 2019 Lecture, “Changing Out of Your Typographic Sweatpants”), I’m now feeling really good about my audio. I might ask Langston if it’s possible to improve the quality of the audio from the Typographics lecture, if I end up having time.

The voiceover now reads, “I want to dispel the myth that default sans typography is a good idea. It homogenizes our visual culture, which I think is super dangerous, and it might save time, but at what cost? We’re coming out of a trend right now that’s like, very sterile and geometric, and I hope where it goes from here just blows the doors off everything and people start going wild. You can find some really amazing stuff if you start digging. There’s no shortage of it. I hope I’m remembered for pushing some typographic boundaries. You know, I’m not really contributing anything meaningful to the world with just like this tiny, tiny, small drop of weird typefaces, but for me, it feels like it gives my life purpose!”

I’ve updated my storyboard to fit my new audio, and if I have more time today, I’ll start building out my elements in Illustrator.

April 8–20

I don’t have exported files of in-progress pieces (because I simply could not be bothered to deal with Media Encoder more times than I had to).

My process was very simple. I pretty much just made my storyboard shot for shot, and then adjusted from there.

Things that changed:

• I moved his name from the beginning to the end, mostly because there wasn’t time where I originally planned for it to be.
• I removed the words “sterile and geometric” from the logo section—they don’t add anything to the audience’s understanding and I don’t think they were reading well.
• I changed the droplet from expanding to falling and then filling the screen, since that makes more sense for a drop of water or ink.
• I changed how “gives my life purpose” appears, but only VERY subtly.
• I changed the transition from “Really Amazing” to “digging” — rather than just cutting from one screen to another, I’m keeping the “-ing” and changing out the rest of the word.

I’m not totally sold on that last transition—I don’t think it’s the best solution for that transition, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything better.

Here’s the final video!