Raw Type

D&AD Workout (Part 1): Art Directing The Idea

Posted by Tom | Posted in General

As part of Raw’s commitment to education, myself and fellow designer Nick Greenwood have taken a couple of trips to ‘That London’ for D&AD Workouts. The first was held by This Is Real Art’s Paul Belford with a surprise visit from Saatchi & Saatchi graduate, Alex Taylor.  It was entitled Art Directing the Idea and in hindsight was obviously very catered for art directors…

After discussing what ‘art direction’ was, we were treated to a couple of videos. The first was this animation by Kyle Cooper’s Imaginary Forces on the great Paul Rand:

“Has anybody heard of Helmut Krone?”

… (shamed silence).

Helmut Krone was an art directing guru. His ads for Volkswagen and Avis are timeless; in fact his VW template can still be seen in their ads today. They are elegant, simple yet clever and it was obvious he had a great appreciation for copywriting and typography. His search for ‘the new page’ approach led to some interesting type experiments.

Typical Volkswagen campaign.

Beautiful composition reflecting Polaroid’s photographs.

Clever copywriting for this Avis campaign.

Typographic experimentation in this Audi poster.

So far there seemed to be 2 contrasting points of view to art direction; Paul Rand’s “Don’t try to be original, just try to be good” and Helmut Krone’s continuous search for ‘the new page’.

Paul Belford’s work is sickeningly good – great ideas, beautifully executed. You can certainly see Krone’s influence in his work. Experimental layouts, omitting logos, copy rich and copy sparse campaigns are running themes. It was great to see how varied the outcomes were to often similar problems. However great a solution was, Paul described the thought process so simply:

“The issue was broiler chickens, so we produced the advert like it was on heavy manufactured packaging” – easy.

RSPCA – Broiler Chickens campaign

Dept. For Transport – Drink Drive campaign

Dept. For Transport – Road Safety campaign

The Type Museum – Type Face brand campaign

The Type Museum – Type Face brand campaign (various)

Taylor popped in after lunch and presented several ads she’d art directed including her famous Silk Cut billboards. Another thing she did was to show a piece of work she’d art directed next to the original and asked all of our opinions – brave. In honesty, Nick and I preferred the original and had the unfortunate job of speaking up first.

One of several Silk Cut campaigns that Alex Taylor art directed.

We took several things out of the experience; great copywriting is essential and can often be the star of an advert. Another is ‘pushing back’ – “designers don’t push back enough”. In fact Paul was pushing back all day in-between speaking with us. And last was that there is always another way of communicating an idea – in fact there are lots. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves of this in order to broaden our skills and continue to make interesting work.

Overall it was a fantastic experience, but it would have been improved with a bit more discussion, hands-on design and feedback. We’d highly recommend it.

Also, this is a great resource where you can browse much of Clive Challis’ book on Helmut Krone: www.enchorial.com