Book Trailer For “You Are Not So Smart” In Animated Typography

Yesterday morning while preparing my work for this week a tweet by Maria Popova of the Brain Pickings blog led me to this neat trailer. It advertises the book You Are Not So Smart: Why you have too many friends on Facebook, why your memory is mostly fiction and 46 other ways you are deluding yourself. It is written by David McRaney who for the past three years has been running his blog of the same name which publicly explores our self delusions through narrative journalism. More than merely a hard copy of the blog, half of the book contains never-before-published material, while the other half is material from the blog that has been polished and expanded.

Created in Adobe Ilustrator and animated in Adobe After Effects
Storyboard and Animaton – Devon Laird
Artwork and SFX – Brad Clark
Script and Voice Over – David McRaney (author of You Are Not So Smart)

The kinetic typography video offers an eye-opening view on procrastination, appealingly visualised with typographic animation. It was animated, designed and produced by Plus3 Productions. This collective of creative designers and producers is located in Hattiesburg, MS, and was founded by Davon Laird and Brad Clark who have a combined 13 years of experience working in commercial production. Together, they created Plus 3 to combine their freelance work.

The animation uses an intriguing, kind of ragtag mix of faces. The main typeface is American Purpose – a top heavy, compact sans that almost looks hand lettered. It bears traces of Roger Excoffon’s classic French sans serif Antique Olive with a hint of Flyer Condensed and TF Forever mixed in. Amongst the other type designers who investigated reversed stress in typefaces possibly the most noteworthy is Evert Bloemsma with FF Balance. More recently David Jonathan Ross also pays specific attention to the relation between thick and thins and examines how inversing them influences readability, like for example in his playful slab serif Trilby. The use of Futura Condensed makes little sense to me, as there is not enough difference with the main face to justify its use. And its a horrid design anyway.

Other typefaces in the video are the inline serif faces Caslon Open Face and Chevalier with its ornamental fill. My Festive Engraved Type tutorial shows how you can create this effect yourself for the upcoming holidays. Helvetica pops up here and there in the small type; ITC Kabel in bigger words. Trajan has that thing checked out by the doctor, and the foreign language is symbolised by University Roman. Choosing a pixel font for video games is a no-brainer.

Tags: animation, book, trailer, typographic animation, video