These are modern infomercials. Concrete pains ("planning a vacation is hard!"), shallow solutions that don't stand up to real-world use, and, in the end, a promise left unfilfilled. (And a thing in your drawer that takes up space.)
honestly, one day i will understand why these guys go so hard on planning vacations.
one of the best parts of vacations is actually planning it! trying to find restaurants, organizing your days, trying to fit activities -- that makes you look forward to your time off.
really, i want to automate the boring parts of my life (did i really pay rent this month?) not the things that make me happy.
Social media has fried some people’s brains so much that it is incredibly anxiety inducing to make many typically mundane or routine choices, for fear of missing / missing out on something.
I think they're grabbing at universally-understood frictions that people associate with pleasure or anxiety … or, most powerfully, identity.
We all know the feeling of wanting to be successful, or to go on a great vacation. Showing these scenarios creates strong emotional response in the audience - we're now the people winning at work, going on a great vacation. This is especially important when you're selling something dull. See: insurance.
> if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!
I'll play!
My recommendation, in short: pick a new font, make the content pane narrower (around 75 characters per line), and increase line height by 15%.
The font you use, Montserrat, has nice details, but they're extremely subtle, and our eye doesn't pick them up at text size.The font uses very pure geometry [1], has really big counters [2], is light in weight, and has no visible stroke contrast [3]. The effect when you look at the screen is that you see big blocks of text, but struggle to register individual characters, and it's hard to find the beginning of the next line. Add the lack of capitalization, and it feels like a monologue, like you're playing rubber-duck for someone.
A challenge: everybody uses Google Fonts, and all the good fonts get used so heavily they end up losing their ability to make people feel something.
Pick a font that is good [4] and feels comfortable to you. Ideally, buy one. You get what you pay for. And you go from being one of the millions of people who use a certain font to being one of fifteen.
If you like the feel of Montserrat, Tiny Grotesk [5] and Decimal [6] would both be great choices and are from excellent type designers. Or browse Matthew Butterick's font recommendations [4]. They're good. You're out $50, but it's yours.
If you're absolutely allergic to paying for fonts, DM Sans and Work Sans are Google Fonts, have a similar feel to Montserrat, and solve the above problems. But then you're a robot.
A final note: Montserrat is actually a nice headline font. The details come into focus at larger sizes and weights. So I'm going to open a can of worms: you could pick a _contrasting_ body font. Remember PT Serif from the [3] footnote? Try it on for size.
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[1] By that, I mean things like: an "o" looks like a perfect circle rather than an oblique oval, and forms are strictly on 90º axes.
[2] Counters are the apertures of letters, the open center of an "o" being one.
[3] This is the contrast in "line" size. Think of it like the width of the line when you write with a chisel-tip marker: some lines end up thinner, some thicker. Look at the "e" on the font PT Serif - the vertical walls of the character are thicker, horizontal thinner. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=S...
Ah, fellow Butterick fonts enjoyer—Butterick's fonts have spoiled me: compared to pretty much every other professional font I've seen, they're the cheapest and most conveniently licensed fonts out there.
That's easy. The columns have to be narrow enough that you can still read a full column of scripture while your éclair rests on the other half of the page. That's why a full-spread layout is referred to a "qautréclair."
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