Secrecy is important to any firm who wants to launch a new product. By surprising the competitors with a product the firm can increase its market share, reputation and have generally an advantage. If another firm knows about the new product he can potentially launch a competing product earlier. Especially in the B2B world this can be disrupting. As an Art Director you are often directing also the overall communication of your client – so even this topic is of your business. After the break I talk about how I discovered a secret product line through crowd sourcing and how we can prevent such an event. …click here to continue…
There are beautiful portfolio sites out there in the web and I wanted to redo my portfolio site because like most of the websites of designers my site was:
Quite out of date
Not very compelling any more
The reasons because my site was like this are easy to find. If you are a busy designer you mostly don’t have time to update your site. In the last years I started a blog and used twitter to engage with my audience, so the time for the portfolio is even smaller. Maintaining a portfolio site is not as easy and there are many big sites where you can upload your portfolio. The question was, what should I do. …click here to continue…
Sometimes things just won’t work. You made a nice communication concept, build a campaign and everything the execution was impeccable. But when you and your client look at the results they don’t meet the expectations. Now what should you do? Normally we would think that we would try harder – but you shouldn’t. …click here to continue…
Why more and more companies choose to publish their own magazine is a wider topic I will cover in a future post. I will start my new series about corporate publishing by demystifying a myth – corporate publishing is boring. I will show you in this lesson how you can make a graphically stunning article about the introduction of a new window hardware product line by telling a story.
Trainees or intern as they are called are part of the responsibilities an art director has. I’m not talking about the bad habit of using trainees as regular workers, sometimes referred to as “precarity” or “underclass”, but about the trainees coming from schools doing a few weeks of internship to learn about the real work in an agency.
I had in the past problems finding the right jobs for the trainees as I was caught up in my daily routine and when they actually showed up at my desk I wondered what would fit. I therefore setup a routine for finding jobs around the year to have them ready. Find out how I did it and the 3 rules for successfully managing a graphic design trainee. …click here to continue…
You ever wondered why some magazines appeal you more than others? One thing you rarely been teached is how to do appealing covers. Even when you are in corporate publishing and layout the corporate news magazine having a nice cover is good. Besides the text layout having an appealing foto is key. But not every photo does the same good job. Here a few examples and why they work. …click here to continue…
How many times have you heard your client say: “You can fix this later in Photoshop.” or “We don’t need a photo shooting, we just combine the photos we have.” As an art director one of your jobs is to ensure that the quality of the final product lives up to the standard you set. To ensure this quality you have to look at all aspects. We already discussed the copywriting part, now let’s look at the photography. …click here to continue…
Most of us designers and art director use systems based on DAM every day without noticing it. If you search for images on a website like Getty Images or Corbis you use the web frontend of a DAM. Actually every website has it’s own DAM where it stores the images. But what are the new capabilities of modern DAMs and how can they help you in your daily work. Here some ideas. …click here to continue…
Why should an art director be bothered with file structure, server setups and all this organization stuff? Isn’t this the business of the IT-departments? Well, yes if you are in a big agency and you have an IT-department and even then only for the “physical” part. At the end of the day you and you team have to work with the files every day, not the IT-department, so it’s time to get in charge. Here a few tips. …click here to continue…
At the end of the month when all the work is done the only thing that counts is the money in your pocket. It may sound drastic, but it’s the truth. You can be proud of your work, be passionate about your design and network with designers all over the work – but without the money you won’t last long. The worst thing I’ve seen are designers with plenty of work but no money on their bank account. How can this happen? I will show you a few examples. …click here to continue…
What is the job of an art director anyway. How is it like? And how to learn to do the things the right way in real life. I will present you here some insights and some tutorials about becomming an art director, not just a graphic designer. Tips & Tricks you won't learn in any school and normally you will have to figure them out yourself. So go ahead and start your lessons.
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