JOSH D. WEISS is an ART DIRECTOR.

Give Em' Helvetica

Short Film

If there can be blind photographers, there can be type blind graphic designers. I wrote and produced a short film about a graphic designer named Eric Hutner who has a medical condition called "Type Blindness." In the first week of it's release we broke 2,250 views.

Humblebrags

Y'allywood Film Festival

Website

To help tell Eric's story, we built him a portfolio filled with examples of his work. The video primarily lives on his site so visitors can better understand his condition before looking at his work samples. In the first week, we got over 1,000 unique page views from people who watched the video then followed the link in the description. You can see his full portfolio at www.erichutner.com.

Wild Postings

To search for other people with Type Blindness in the design community, we helped Eric identify the best places to post his flyers around NYC and then went around helping him spread the word. The URL on the flyers redirected to Eric's website.

LinkedIn

Another way we targeted the people most likely to enjoy our film was to create a LinkedIn account for Eric. His profile was set up to drive people to the film and his website.

After his profile was ready to go, we started adding people in the advertising and design industry and picked up some big names along the way.

To game the feed, we had Eric posting occasionally to generate interest in his condition. We posted an FAQ about his condition along with occasional links to the video. He also asked for help picking out new fonts for his website after he found out the fonts were illegible.

Within a week, Eric had connected with over 1,100 people in the industry including many Founders, CCO's and ECD's at big name agencies and design groups around the country. He currently counts over 1,500 connections. Not bad for a guy who doesn't exist.

A few headhunters even reached out to Eric about work opportunities. Not even joking about that one.

Feel free to check out his account here.