Dec 20, 2007 by Andreas  |  Published in Design

Where is the business in art direction?

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Being an art director is, to me, 10% art and 90% direction, and still a majority of the art directors I meet is the “I’m not in a inspirational mood so therefore I can’t work” type of art directors.

A lot of them fail misreably on the business side of the trade. The difference between the art-guy and the director-guy is that the art-guy are brilliant craftsmen but fail on the level of delivery that is needed, mostly cos they are losing focus on the purpose and result of the project and often starts to focus on the details or design issues instead of the business issues. The director-guy is often not as brilliant in craftmenship but generally strong in pushing the clinets business forward.

So who is worth your money?

Well, my advise would be to hire both guys but give the director-type 90% of the budget and 10% to the arty guy. Why? The clients is not buying your art skills in Illustrator, Photoshop och InDesign, that can be found in any street-corner 24 hours a day. The client is buing you skills in business development and your understanding of their revenue … and that is rarely found.

If you or your business only get the director guy you are going to get flexible and effective communication and the investment will end up in your black figures, but your business will be considered stale, traditional and boring. If you only get the arty guy you will have the coolest brand ever but your everyday grassroot level of communication will be unadapable to different situations and hard to understand.

So, you as a buyer of design and communication must be able to see the need of both types and then you can have a strong foundation to base your business on and in campaigns and your brand will top of mind.

So, now that you read “Where is the business in art direction?”, what is your thoughts?



There is 2 responses to “Where is the business in art direction?”

  1. Duncan Macdonald Says:

    March 18th, 2008 at 11:02 am

    I half agree. I think the industry has shot itself in the foot by continually hiring the wrong type of people in the first instance. There are plenty of talented people out there who can easily do both, but do they ever get the job? Often I find that creative directors, managing directors don’t want to hire the best staff, because those staff make them look bad. Good directors should do both, business AND creative, not one or the other.

  2. Andreas Carlsson Says:

    March 19th, 2008 at 7:22 am

    I agree with you Duncan, there is a lot of art directors out there with art and business skills. But my problem still is that the majority is unaware/uninterested in their clients business progress.

    And it is, as you say, partly the industries own fault. When deciding on who to hire companies rarely (almost never) asks for the result of the portfolios they are viewing, it’s too easy to be blinded by the visuals in a selection process.

    And at the end of the day the director is mostly facing business problems not visual ones.