How to Level up Your Art Direction

Forel is known for famously saying that creativity without business is victimization and business without creativity is a waste of time. Amen. And that brings us to one of the topics that I'm most passionate about, we're most passionate about, we talk a lot about in our hyper newsletter, which is art direction.

And there's just not enough content on the internet about tactically how brands look at art direction for something that's extremely important. So, how would you define art direction in context of a brand? One of the most important things about art direction is asking yourself the question, how do I want to make the person who's going to see this feel and see any brand imagery, right?

And when you start to really have that question of what emotion am I soliciting by any piece of imagery someone sees for my brand, now you're entering into the world of art direction. And today we're going to look at pretty two pretty radical examples of how that is. We're going to spend a lot of time going through some campaigns and actually visiting the latest campaign that's being shot for our friends at Bandit Running.

We're probably one of the most interesting art direction related like up andcoming brands out currently. And they've been gracious enough to allow us to come on their spring campaign shoot. And then we're also going to see the complete opposite side and talk to our friend Jason Murray who's formerly an art director at Amazon to say, "Hey, when you're working at Amazon, you're looking at really small boxes and widgets all day.

How do you bring those same art direction ethos? And then what is that operations flow actually look like? " So, I'd love to talk a little bit about Bandit.

What are some of your favorite campaigns and the reasons why they're so highly regarded for art direction? Bennett's only been around for a few years, but it feels like they're mature enough to have been around for decades at this point. The campaigns and the art direction that we know and love them for, from their summer madness campaign with the rising sun and the heatwave aesthetic to a lot of the LED film photography lighting that they manipulate and mess with on set.

And even one of my personal favorites is the New York City subway campaign they did where they built an entire subway set in the corner of a studio for the New York City Marathon. It's a pretty amazing to see what a brand who really emphasizes concepts in a space that is saturated like running. There's a ton of running brands out there and they've said everything we do is going to be conceptual.

We're going to have all these through lines that are creative in our brand and then we're actually going to use that in almost everything we do from pop-up shops to how we come across online. It's pretty wonderful. And we're going to talk with Tim from there about all the strategy and how they actually implement that and how they're doing it with their latest campaign.

But I do want to talk about some other examples of great art direction. You had one you featured in the newsletter the other week that I I really love. You want to we'll give a little talk about it?

Yeah. The example is Outsiders Store, which is a adventure and outdoor focus brand and retailer based in the UK. And one of the reasons I love their art direction is the way that they take everyday products on plain and simple backdrop somehow feel more interesting than it should be.

Yeah. And you want you featured one campaign in particular where it was a climbing, you know, give us a little breakdown. There's countless examples of great art direction in their work.

From the way that they are not afraid of making their products feel messy on a backdrop to how each photo has a model that's tied to a specific action. They can even show off a brand's wide ranging colorways by just layering it on the model. Ultimately, Outsiders understands that the way you make people feel through your art direction is the most important thing.

Basically, what you see is every single choice they make from an imagery perspective is intentional and has a concept behind it. And when it comes down to to brands, I like to look at as a brand that has no art direction. A brand that's just you consume their thing.

They haven't thought about that. A brand that art directs some things. Okay, this campaign is but everything else is normal.

Or a brand that says every decision we make is going to have a reason, is going to have a concept, is going to have thought through like the human insight behind what we want our viewer to feel. And that's the journey that we're going to talk through today. So come on a ride to Red Hook in New York City with us and let's go visit the campaign.

So, we're here with our guy Tim from Bandit Running. Tim has become a good friend of ours. We're actually on set for one of their upcoming campaign shoots.

So, want to first and foremost just frame up the conversation by saying like what are we doing here? Walk us through the campaign. Sure.

Yeah. We're on set for our spring 2025 campaign that drops at the end of February. So, we're in production week, then we have two weeks of post, and then the rollout week.

We're in Red Hook, which is home of a million textures and backgrounds, and it's this gritty architecture and and landscape that really captures the essence of distance running in New York. When you break out of your neighborhood and you're in no man's land and you find yourself, you know, ripping alone. So, we're trying to capture that a little bit.

It's really impressive to see the creative operation that you've built within the team, both people who work full-time, but then people who are also contracted out for some of these collections and campaigns that you're doing. It's it's very clear that you put a lot of thought and love and care into the drops. And I think what's most interesting is just your process and your philosophy behind art direction for each one.

Each drop has a specific theme and a narrative in mind and the creative is different. It feels like you're trying to offer something unique each time you do it as opposed to just rerunning the same hits every time. So I'm curious about your philosophy of art direction within the brand.

How you see that? Is there a winning formula that you have? Maybe talk us a little bit through that stuff.

I always consider Bandit the evil conval of running. And what I mean by that is people didn't go to watch evil conval land a stunt and do the same stunt over and over again. They went to watch him make the attempt and try something new, whether he's jumping through a hoop of fire or over a line of buses or off a cliff.

And he's switching it up. And people are just excited to watch them him try something new. And that's what we're trying to do is just whether a campaign resonates with you or not, you have to just respect that we went for it and we experimented and we tried something new and we're trying things that are fresh.

The idea is to land, you know, as much as we can. But it's really not about that. It's just about going for it because our mission is to evolve running and we need to stand by that and, you know, put our creative where our mouth is and try try things that are new.

All right. So, I want to talk about like how far in advance you start planning something like this. So, like when you are you looking at right now you're executing this campaign, like what are you looking at next?

How far is that calendar? And then what are all those kind of phases of actually putting something like this together? About a year in advance, a mood board goes up in our office.

There's four of them, one for each season. My co-founder and our chief design officer, Ardith, she puts together this impeccable variety of images that capture what she's going to end up designing into over the next 11 months. And for the collection itself, collection itself.

I say that all because over the next 11 months through osmosis and me looking at it every day. I do really believe that it helps me absorb what she's intending to design and then it's my job to creatively translate that into a campaign. And so she starts off with this brilliant manifesto where overgrowth came from initially and then I'm able to take that and say, "Okay, how can we interpret that as we're bringing the vision to life?

What else can we do? How can we [ __ ] it up a little bit and and you know make a mess of it? How does that work in application too?

Because you have like the main campaign idea. Obviously you have a shoot. Does it go anywhere else like inside the business?

How does it spread through like all the things you do as a brand? The best example of this is for our capsules. So our capsules are 360° brand moments.

And what I mean by that is the product exists around a story and that story can be around a moment. And then how are you interacting with that moment? And that's the 360.

So for example, our Chicago marathon last year, we did this architecture themed capsule. Obviously Chicago known for the architecture. We had product that had this blueprint inspired, you know, graphic and pattern on it.

And then we told the story of Marathon Course Design Corp, a fake architecture studio. Love it. After my own heart.

Yeah. where the guy was drawing and coming up with the course of the Chicago Marathon and then we did the editorial in this fake studio and then our popup which is this the environment the ecosystem felt like you were walking into an architect studio and then that activation how could you interact with it? You could sit at the table and get a portrait with your finisher medal and you could sign the journal and if you were to buy something you would get a, you know, a free architect journal with an architect's pencil and it was just 360° brand activation and those are the most fun to create.

How do you organize all that? Is this like happening in just a master document or like what's what's the flow to be like all right we have all these pieces? Yeah, it's a combination of a workback schedule where each I guess each squad.

So, we have the pop-up squad, we've got the campaign squad, we've got the product squad, we've got the experience squad. So, they're all pushing forward over the course of weeks their own milestones and they know what to do and know how to time them. And then each week we get into a room and we say, "All right, updates on how we're progressing towards all of this coming together.

" product team will give an update, say, you know, things are shipping. The experience team will say, we've, you know, we've locked down the space. The campaign team will say, here's where set design is.

And so, it's really just everybody swimming together in one synchronized direction and it's worked well so far. There's always been something, I think, experiential and kind of magical about the campaigns you guys have done. So, seeing that connection to the actual inspiration is really interesting.

Any other kind of muses or references there that, you know, you or the team kind of consistently go back to? I I really do mostly go back to Universal Studios. I also go back to different directors that that were really inspired by whether it's, you know, Kubric lately.

I've been diving into all his movies again. I'm taking inspiration for a collaboration that we have. But at the same time, I'm marrying that with another inspiration.

So, I'll give it away and maybe this will come out before or after. But but a collaboration we're working on is like what if Kubric met Nguchi and bringing in two completely different schools of thoughts and types of creative and marrying them together to give birth to something entirely new and then layering bandit on top on top of it cuz then you get that the triple. It's funny like people always ask what's a creative direction technique and like a clash is like one of them, right?

It's like hey you get one thing, you get another thing, how do you put them together? If you have that brand DNA and you can actually make it feel like universally you it's a really standout stand you've done a bunch of these campaigns bunch of these things. What was the most challenging one to get from your vision to reality of all all the things y'all have done as a brand so far?

Our winter shoot was very logistically challenging but I would say either winter in Iceland with the helicopter logistics. It was one helicopter that could only car helicopter brand shoot logistically. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you know what? We we showed up.

We didn't really have much of it planned. We went to a couple helicopter tour companies. We convinced one of them to give us a deal on the back of exchanging some photos for them.

Yeah. And, you know, having that resourceful mindset, but it could only carry four people. We had eight people on set.

We were doing remote locations. There was one gas, you know, refill place in the middle. So, he was doing shifts and we were we almost ran out of fuel probably three different times.

It's very, very scary, but that one was logistically very difficult. Also, Saint Vincent and the Grenardines, our Olympic capsule. Last year, I flew down to St.

Vincent and that's where we were going to shoot. We wanted to shoot in their home nation. We wanted to make it, you know.

Oh, I was going to say that look what ended up in Paris. Yeah, it ended up in Paris and not not a lot of people know this story, but I flew down to St. Vincent.

John and Henry were right behind me, our photographer and our producer. And I landed and I got an alert on my phone that a category 4 potentially I think it turned into a five category 5 hurricane was heading straight for St. Vincent.

The athletes who were living in the states at the time were about to leave. We were canceling their flight. I caught the last flight out.

John and Henry got stuck in Trinidad. They bunkered down. The shoot never happened.

The islands got pretty messed up. They're they've been through it before, so they were ready for it. But that was logistically one of the most insane ones because we were supposed to shoot that week.

The Olympics was in two weeks. We flew straight to Paris and we shot the campaign on Friday, Saturday and released it Monday, Tuesday. The evolution adaption you have to have when you're really in the really in the game.

Yeah. You spent all this time and energy actually like out here creating these assets, planning it, putting everything together. How do you actually roll out a campaign?

You know, any kind of guidance for people that are trying to do that better? I I would say spend a ton of time on it. really sit with the photos, lay them all out, organize them, look at them over and over again.

And the way I think about creating a post is usually I try to get it between five and seven photos and carousel. Yeah, carousel baby. And I make sure that it really undulates throughout.

So whether it's undulating from composition, the first shot is wide, the second shot is tight, the third one is maybe from super far away or maybe it's edited in black and white as opposed to the next photo which will be in color again. And really making sure that as you're swiping through the carousel, you're staying really energized and you're not bored and you want to just see what's next because it was different from the one before and it's it's telling this story. I would say when you're laying out a post, make sure that you're making people entertained to all the way to the last one.

And in fact, if your last one can be as good as your first one, you know, that'll train folks to make sure that stay. Yes. Stay to the end.

Any other kind of like tactics or logistics like on on roll out or making sure you make the most of your assets, you know, never forget when you're on shoot that 50% of this gets done in post, right? You can always [ __ ] up a campaign and, you know, get really weird with it in post if things aren't working or looking exactly the way that you imagined. You know, editors can take average photos and turn them into art.

What's an example of that that like where you really felt like, hey, we really went the opposite of where the industry was going or where you're looking at? I think this spring campaign, what we're about to release is a video where and you know, we everyone copies each other. We don't copy anyone ever.

This spring campaign is something that is so different. It's so fresh. It's never been done in running before.

It's just not something that you you you see or you expect. And we're going against the grain and nobody's ever done it. I think you know people it's going to go all the way back to the beginning of this video where like even if it's not for you, you're just going to like that we made the attempt.

I love to hear it. Looking forward to see the campaign come out and thanks for chopping up with us in the cold. Thanks.

Thanks, guys. [Music] All right. So, let me get a little bit of your background.

We've known each other for a while, but you've been through like a bit of a transition. You were a art director at a major company and now you are a creative on your own terms. Want to give us a little bit of your your history and background?

I I really got into art direction because I couldn't decide on like what I wanted to do and I was doing like video editing, animation, you know, figuring out just how to get my ideas out into the world and ended up like I was in school figuring out all the different things and found art direction. Yeah. Because I didn't have to choose.

It could be a little bit of photography, a little bit of video, a little bit of animation, a little bit of, you know, design, tons of different things all combined together. For me, it was all about just ideas. And so I got into art direction first by going straight into ad agencies which to me seemed like the easiest path to really like you know getting into a creative field and creative creative stuff.

Your your background for people that don't know you were an art director at Amazon and how does that work in like a big company environment? I think people understand from an ad agency perspective they can get a view of that but if you're working inside you know like the beast of major industry what does that role entail? Oh man Amazon.

Yeah. 1. 5 million employees like the biggest company ever and they still have creative departments.

But what's I think what's interesting is like they're still modeling all of their creative departments after ad agencies because you know ad agencies just have like the model down of understanding campaigns, understanding how to like turn out a lot of assets and also connect with production vendors and get things made. So in in a lot of ways it was really similar to being at an ad agency. I found my team at Amazon was a brand innovation lab.

It was within the advertising org of Amazon and advertising is just so massive for Amazon. It's a huge business. My job was still to just come up with ideas but within the sandbox of Amazon to like help brands like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Craft Hinds, help them do advertising on Amazon but within like a sandbox.

So it's still yeah ideas and campaigns and stuff. That sandbox idea is interesting. I think that's a lot of what people don't think about is like everyone understands the concept of the idea.

Many people think they can have those ideas, but really it comes down to, hey, you have to have an idea within the sandbox, within like this set of tools. And so you've now made this transition where you've started making content, made content, it's been like a part of your career. It's allowed you to do kind of other things.

What was, you know, what was that process? That's something you recommend like other people do. And where has that kind of led you?

It's really changed my career. And the process of like for me getting into content was honestly me just wanting to get more of my ideas out into the world and to have more creative control over those ideas. realizing that it isn't that different than the advertising campaigns and brand campaigns that I was coming up with and wanting to just, you know, put out more things.

Like I was waiting like 3 to 6 months for a campaign to launch and it was like I'm itching for people to see my work and I just wanted to like get stuff out there. But then I took like cut 30 and took your guys' course and that just helped me in a lot of ways realize that hooks and coming up with ideas for for content videos were those same things that I was learning in the advertising world. It's just that, you know, when I would get a social brief or something, I had to come up with social content for a thing.

I wasn't putting all that much thought into it cuz like my relevance and my clout wasn't on the line with those. Yeah. Well, I also think it's like that's a good insight.

I feel like one of the reasons I encourage so many creative people to be involved in that content process is that you're going through these briefs and doing it, but you don't actually know what makes it work. But then as soon as you go through the oh, I need to make a hook to turn this, you're now thinking in a way that's like more modern creative. And one thing I really like about your content, and for those kind of watching who haven't seen Jason's content, he has like a branded thing like like the lazy creative, which is back to that human insight.

notices there are a lot of creative people who are just a little bit messy who really don't want to put in that extra there's like this missing 10% whatever but there's also like it's kind of a hook that those people also have within them the ability to make their dreams come true in the same way and you kind of hooked onto that like hey do you want to just take the slightly easier route I'm going to appeal to that and you really branded the content throughout it and so your content feels like it's like art directed in itself which I thought was really compelling what are problems and challenges that you have in your own personal workflow how do you find ways to work through those things whether it's like working on a client project working through an idea you're trying to build and iterate on that you can then share with your own community and audience and how do you think about problem solving from that perspective too? I think the biggest thing for me is I mean a lot of people talk about time management and for me it's like time management all the way down to the thinking time all the way down to like when I'm going to deliver a file. And so like that's for for me that's the only way I've been able to stay productive.

And I don't consider myself a very amazing creative person like that amazing of a designer. I'm a ter in a lot of ways I'm a terrible type like a type designer. I'm an okay uh photographer.

I'm an okay this. But I've just always tried to overd deliver on ideas, overd deliver on being hyper communicative and making sure I don't miss deadlines. And so time management down to like I'm going to spend 15 minutes before this call thinking of what I'm going to say on the call or I'm going to spend 15 minutes after this client meeting, you know, recapping and collecting my thoughts and then sending a recap to them.

You know, every single thing making sure I block that out on my calendar. And it just keeps me on track. And that's the stuff that you got to do when you're not as creative as other people.

You know, for other people who are interested in art direction or for brands that are looking at integrating art direction in a more seamless way into their own brands and the products that they sell, what advice do you have for those people as they're looking to break into either the field or again integrate it into their existing brand? Yeah, I think the biggest misconception about our direction is that it's synonymous with design. It's not like a piece of advice, but that's the biggest thing that I would try to hammer home is that once you realize that art direction is not design and art direction is not always senior designer.

Art direction is a conceptual field where you're really coming up with, you know, ideas that can spread across multiple things from design to photography to film. You know, there's so many fields and knowing how to communicate a vision to the people that are tactically doing the work is just as important as the work itself. Exactly.

It's very much a visual coordinator role. And that doesn't always mean manager either. Like I started as a junior art director coordinating and helping coordinate the vision across a lot of different assets, but I wasn't necessarily like more senior.

I wasn't more senior than most of the designers I was working with. I was just, you know, in that role that was in the keynote deck or in the pitch deck, you know, I and and so that's a that's a really important piece to to like hammer home. What do you think about the future of our direction, whether it's on a personal level, on the brand level, where are we headed and how do you see that role evolving internally?

I really see it going towards content. The reason why I've jumped into content is because it's just a natural extension of our direction. It's ideas plus a combination of like every visual medium from yeah photography design to fashion to whatever.

And so you get to dabble in everything. And so the future of a lot of art directors is probably going to look like them becoming creators or part-time creators in a lot of ways. That's I I think a really big opportunity.

me, it's an opportunity I've seen because as I've jumped into content creation, it's allowed me to get my ideas out into the world, but also instead of me trying to like get into the DMs or inboxes of creative directors and I now have like chief creative officers and DMing me like asking me questions about stuff. And so it's allowed me to get a little bit more authority and control over my creative future in our direction. [Music] So to wrap this up, what are some trends, some tactics that any brand who's really focused on their art direction should be thinking about?

So the first and probably the most important is making the most of your shoots and then all of your existing and prior assets. Every campaign you do, and a campaign could be everything from like an actual big production campaign to photo shoots for a new release or video shoots for a new product, needs behind the scenes and a plan for behind the scenes. needs the actual application of the campaign and needs to think about the other places where the campaign could travel, whether that's other networks, whether that's influencers that could be involved and really making sure you're comprehensively thinking through it.

Now, on the other side of that, all your prior assets, all the things your brand has over time, your archives, your history, how can you with an art direction lens look at putting that into modern formats, whether that's emails that go to your list, whether that's carousels that go on your feed, whether it's presentation inside the things you're already doing. How do you leverage stuff that's already been paid for and captured to help tell the story of how your brand got to where it is today? Because a lot of consumers may not have that same history and knowledge and you've already got the assets to help do it.

I do think the archives are one of the things that any brand with a history is not tapping into nearly enough. And then a huge trend to talk about is the art direction of everything. We've all seen, you know, meta campaigns get more expensive or fighting organic content against brands that are getting savvier and savvier.

But if you already have existing eyeballs, if you already have people that are in your funnel, they're opening your emails, they're coming to your web page, there's organic traffic, you have this baseline of existing brand interaction, and savvy teams are looking at how do we make every part of that process stand out through an art direction lens. And this goes for everything from how your e-commerce images look on the page to the in-depth parts of your website and what the layouts are there to those little individual interactions on things like landing pages or checkout or email flows. How are you making sure your most captivating imagery that your same brand principles and art direction lens is applied to all those micro interactions?

And the last thing is looking at creative scale for your good ideas. One of the biggest trends like we talked about with Dara inside this series is this idea of creative volume. Every performance team needs more ads.

Every social team wants to post more in the campaigns. People want to be able to do more emails. Customers need more touch points.

And so one of the things to think about is can your art direction briefs can what succeeds in your content, your campaigns be scaled and how to do it. And one of the recommendations I have there is really reusing or using pieces of your existing briefs. If something works or if a concept works, think about how it applies.

If you have a core visual idea from your art direction that's been applied to a campaign, can you push that same idea or a subsection of that idea to all of your influencer work in and around that for the next month or two? Same thing with UGC. Can they incorporate some of these little things, whether it's just a visual idea all the way to an entire vibe or a set or a look that can be a through line in all the things your brand is marketing.

And if you're trying to get started in this and you're like, how does my brand begin to have a real art direction, intention, and lens? My number one rule is that everything needs to have a concept. If you're doing a shoot, how is it not just, oh, we swapped this color or this background or we shot in this place?

What is the idea? Just one thing takes you from a photo that gets shot to an actual artdirected concept. And if you just apply that one thing principle, think of what that storyline is, what that one extra piece of everything is, you're beginning to view the world through an art direction lens.

So, I'm Orin at Orin Meets World. I've been doing this with Clayton Chambers who runs at Spreza spre. za and together we run the hyperbrand strategy newsletter.

So if you want to check out more of this on a regular basis, we publish that every week. And then a big shout out to who has put this whole series together to help brands really understand creative operations.