In school, I worked within After Effects for my typography course. This course highlighted the importance of readability, legibility, as well as accessibility. For our final project, we were given the opportunity to create projects utilizing the foundations of typography that would fit well with our portfolios. As a graphic designer, I chose the opportunity to familiarize myself more with After Effects via a kinetic typography video.
For the project I chose one of my favorite bands Fontaines D.C. Then, I chose one of my favorite songs by them, “It’s Amazing to Be Young.” I chose this not only because I enjoy the song and band, but also because it gave me greater motivation to do a good job on the project—I wanted to do the band and song justice.
The Style Guide
When approaching the color palette I utilized, I knew I wanted to include the neon green and pink because they it aligns with the branding the band already utilizes. This allowed me to build off of the foundation that they had already built and to give my audience familiarization with the branding. I brought in black as a base color to help contrast the two brighter colors and root it. The green and black are seen the most so, when one sees the purple, they are instructed to pay more attention to it. Additionally, I chose these colors because they are the same colors that Fontaines D.C. uses for their branding of this album promotion and tour run, (I will add that the pink provided is actually a darker variation of the pink that they use in their promotional materials. In order for my text to meet accessibility standards against the green background, I had to root the pink in darker tones). I wanted the color palette to compliment the colors that fans already associate with the band to further provide immersion and familiarity to the video.
For the fonts, I knew I wanted to use the font Echoed Vandalism as my accent style. I had utilized it in a prior project for work and I felt the youthfulness, the grungyness, and the almost angst of it felt right for this song. The song is all about how life is hard and sometimes you have to ready yourself to play a part rather than yourself just to survive… but despite all that, is it not just amazing to be young? To experience this life at all? So, this font felt like it encapsulated that energy of angst for the way things are, but still feeling youthful and capturing that youth despite it all. Once I had identified by accent, or tertiary, font, I chose my primary and secondary fonts to help balance this more stylized font out. Avenir Next Heavy and Avenir Next Condensed Heavy were my choices because they were bold, they demanded attention—just as the subject matter of the song does and the musical accompaniment. The heavy boldness of Avenir Next provides a needed balance to the Echoed Vandalism—almost acting as an anchor. Additionally, I decided to add Avenir Next Condensed to have dimension in my bold fonts. I primarily utilize Avenir Next, but in cases where I may want to provide more text on screen or in certain animations, Avenir Next Condensed provides the grounding of the Avenir thickness while overall bringing the characters to be closer and less spread out.
Overall, this three and a half minute video was a large undertaking for someone who had very little prior experience in After Effects. However, working through the kinks in the project along the way and seeing the finished product made all the effort worthwhile. It gave me a great understanding of how to use typography in ways other than leaving it stagnant. It gave me worthwhile experience in animation and it further proved for me that typography itself can be the subject.