Setting the table: Art Direction 101
[EDIT: Hello! 2024 Hiraki here, so many of you have reached out to me saying you’ve used or cited this article in your marketing/advertising program course work. Thank you! If you’re teaching one of these courses, I would absolutely love if you dropped me an email or comment saying where and what you teach!]
As I prepare to exit the agency world and move client-side for the first time, my team asked me to prepare some thoughts on some areas of my experience. I agreed. This is part three of a several-part series on doing creative work in the world of digital-first advertising, and a distillation of what I’ve learned over 8+ years of agency life at Essence and beyond, as a designer, writer, and all-around creative problem-solver.
Art directors do a lot of really cool, important stuff.
They lead creative teams, generate dope af ideas, protect the design process, and develop the visual language of creative executions. That’s a lot, so for our purposes, let’s focus on just that last bit.
Design ≠ Art Direction
An important distinction to make early on is that art direction is not design. Design is functional, executional, and (should be) invisible. Art direction is all about storytelling. When you think about brilliant art direction, don’t think about Jony Ive, instead, consider Donatella Versace. Boldness over sleekness, if we’re painting with extremely broad strokes.
Study the masters
Unlike in the ideation process, where you should think for your goddamn self, art directors should steep themselves in the world of visual art (plus motion and audio, while you’re at it). Make yourself an overflowing fount of visual techniques and motifs, and be able to pull them out on command. You should know what’s trendy (and why), what’s not (and why), what’s nostalgic (and why) and what’s sacred (and why).
The catch? Your references shouldn’t come from other ad campaigns. None.
Need help getting started? Take a dip with some of my favourites from the world of film and fashion. Consider each example, and “say what you see.”
How you choose to interpret these can often be subjective, but knowing how to articulate them is critical. Is it the colour palette? The casting? The lighting? Patterns? Textures? Mood?
Set the table
Observing is great and all, but putting together a mood board for yourself can be sticky. Once I have a rough style in mind (in an, “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of way) I like to think about building a mood board as if I were setting a table.
If your product was the main course, what would you place around it so that it could be properly enjoyed? You need a mix of functional and beautiful objects, and they need to make sense together. Pay attention to the detail, after all, someone will be getting intimately acquainted with every piece you select.
Channel your inner Pinterest-obsessed bride-to-be and consider the following:
Some products are easier to tackle than others. A Nike trainer, for example seems ripe with possibilities:
Exhibit A: From colour, to materials, to the sense of streamlined shapes and crisp textures — all of this makes sense together. This story brings out the sophistication and engineering in the shoe.
Or, we could approach it another way.
Exhibit B: In this example, we’ve taken more cues from nature, giving the shoe a more feminine feeling. Foamy bubbles and soft balloons speak to the bouncy sole. It’s all about communicating comfort.
Not all products are so easy to mood board for. Consider an app, a service, or the type of product that’s meant to blend in; like a security camera.
Instead of mirroring the product, the best way in may to create a world around it:
Or perhaps, considering the product’s perspective:
Ok, your turn
Using your now jaw-dropping powers of mood-boarding, world-building and storytelling, test it out on a product:
- Grab a sheet of paper and a magazine.
2. Open the magazine and flip through to a random page; cut out the first product you see, be it a can of soda, a watch, an app, or a supermarket.
3. Using the rest of the magazine (this simulates things like brand guidelines, production constraints etc), cut and paste yourself a good old fashioned collage-style mood board.
4. Make notes, or, even better, tell the story of your mood board and product to a colleague. Why did you choose those images/colours/textures? What do they say about your product? How do they set the table for your audience?
5. Gold star. Hang your finished work on your mom’s fridge.
Welcome to the world of mood boarding, junior art director. Remember to keep your elbows off the table.
