What an art director actually does

An art director decides what a piece of work should look like, and then makes sure that the finished thing, after it has passed through a dozen other people's hands, still looks that way. The job breaks into four verbs. Decide what the work should look like. Brief the people who will make it. Watch it being made, and correct it while correcting is still cheap. Then take responsibility for the result, which means approving it, defending it to the client and answering for it if it fails. Nearly everything else that gets called art direction is one of those four with a longer name. Learn them as four separate skills, because most people are naturally good at one or two and weak at the rest.

The title covers several jobs, so it helps to know which one you are reading about. In advertising, an art director is one half of a creative team, paired with a copywriter who writes the words, and the two develop the idea together under a creative director. The pairing is usually credited to Bill Bernbach of the New York agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. On a magazine, the art director decides how the covers, pages and photographs look, issue after issue. In film, the art director runs the art department and works directly below the production designer. That second title was invented for Gone with the Wind, because its producer David O. Selznick felt that art director did not describe how much of the film's look William Cameron Menzies controlled. The four verbs hold in all three. What changes is the size of the team you direct.

Art direction is also a different job from design, although one person often does both, and the next lesson, "The difference between art direction and design", draws the line between them. The short version is that a designer makes the thing and an art director decides what thing should be made, and whether the one on the screen is it. Most art directors start as designers and grow into the role by being trusted with small decisions and getting them right.

The most famous piece of art direction in advertising shows the first verb at work. In 1959 Doyle Dane Bernbach began advertising the Volkswagen Beetle in the United States, where it was a small, strange-looking car from a factory the Nazis had built in Wolfsburg, offered to a country buying big cars for growing families. Car advertisements of the time crammed in as much information as they could, and full-colour pages were common. Helmut Krone, the art director, worked on it with the copywriter Julian Koenig. They went the other way. Krone put a small black-and-white photograph of the car in the top left of a page that was mostly empty, with a two-word headline below it, Think small, set in a sans-serif type and ending in a full stop. Every choice on that page was made against the category, and each one turned the car's size into a reason to buy it. In 1999 Advertising Age named it the best advertising campaign of the twentieth century.

The other verbs show in what happened next. Krone art directed the first hundred ads of the campaign while several writers followed Koenig, and although the layout shifted over the years, its essential elements were kept the same, which gave the campaign a house style. Holding a look steady across a hundred ads is watching, done one ad at a time. Choosing people is part of it too. At Vogue in the early 1940s the art director Alexander Liberman took on a young designer, Irving Penn, as an associate in the art department and set him to work on layouts, then asked him to try photography. Penn's first photographic cover for Vogue ran in October 1943, and he went on photographing for the magazine for the rest of his career. What Liberman did there was see what Penn could do and give him the work, and an art director makes that same call on every job that needs a photographer, a stylist or an illustrator.

On an ordinary job the four verbs look like this. Say a small tea company wants photographs of a new green tea for its website and its social posts. Deciding means writing one sentence, such as the ten quiet minutes before the house wakes up, and working out what follows from it, which here means low early light from one side, one cup, a kitchen that looks lived in, and no face. Briefing splits it into instructions. The photographer gets the light and the frame shapes, the stylist gets the cup, the cloth and the hands, and the set designer gets the table and the wall. Watching happens at the tethered screen, the monitor the camera feeds straight into. If the steam vanishes against a pale wall, you ask for the cup to move in front of the dark doorway, and the frame is fixed in ninety seconds. Responsibility comes at the end, when you choose the frames, write down why each one is right, and present them to the client as your choice.