Working With Us

Tips For Art Directors

posted 02/13/08

Hello, Art Director!

Hi there. Welcome. The Internet is awesome. You’re gonna love it. It’s a little bit annoying in the sense that people at your agency might laugh at you for it, but it’s compensated by the fact that it’s much easier to win a pencil or a lion.
Working with The Barbarian Group can go down a lot of different ways. Hopefully you’re working with us because you asked to, and you want to, and so there’s a level of respect for what we’ve done in the past. This isn’t always the case, though. Sometimes we win a job and then they assign an art director on the client side after that. If that’s the case here, hey, what’s up. Let’s get to know each other.
So, the internet. Obviously, being an art director at a prestigious ad agency, you know what’s awesome about the internet, and what other brands and agencies are doing on it. If you’re anything like us, you spend a ton of your free time scouring the Internet for interesting things other agencies are doing. It can get pretty intimidating. It can get a bit myopic. It can get a bit like you want to hurry up and get this thing done to make a name for yourself.
Our goal is to be your partner. We try and take your lead in figuring out the best style to work with you. Are you sketch-on-a-napkin kind of art director? That’s awesome. We’ll get a certain set of resources together to help you. Are you a “I know exactly how I want this done I just need someone to make it go” kind of person? Have all your Photoshop/Illustrator/Freehand1 comps ready and done and know exactly how the site should work? That’s cool too. The key is to let us know up front what your art direction philosophy is up front, and be frank about it. We all talk so much about creative collaboration, but did you know there are studies that show that brilliant ideas are equally likely to come from solo thinking? We don’t always have to be your best buddy. If you know what you want, and you want it to be a certain way, that’s fine. That’s awesome. You’re here because we liked your idea and it seemed like something we wanted to do. Don’t be ashamed of it. But also don’t mislead us. If you’re not gonna need an art director or graphic designer on our end, best to tell us right up front – it’ll save your client money, and it will manage expectations over here.
Also, drinks. Drinks help. Come out drinking. It always makes everything better.
So we’re gonna talk about a few issues that crop up often enough to warrant mention with first time interactive art directors. Don’t sweat it, we’re not trying to lecture you, we just figured we’d say our schpiel now and try and help you out.

Some Comping Notes

The web, basically, is 72dpi.[2] Your monitor, and your customer’s monitor, work in RGB. Your Photoshop/Illustrator/Freehand documents should be set up accordingly. Pantone on the web is a joke. Please avoid using it in the comps you give us. We’ll just convert it to RGB and it’ll look nothing like what you hoped. Color correction, in general, on the web, is a joke. It’s best to throw your hands up in the air and accept it will always look a bit different. You have no idea how much happier we’ve all been since we did this. No one seemed to notice or mind.
If you’re the kind of art director who wants to make comps and wants us to reproduce them as faithfully as possible, that is cool, we’ll do our best, but you would do well to make them the same size as the site. Think about how big the site is going to be. Do you want to fit it on an 800×600 monitor? If you’re unsure how it will look, save out a jpeg and open it up in safari on a 12” or 13” ibook or mac book. Is it all visible in the browser window. What if the browser window isn’t full size? If you’re a idea-on-a-napkin kind of art director, you can ignore all this and we’ll take care of it for you.
And, a final note on the “make the site look as exact as the comps” approach. We’ll give it the old college try, and believe you me, we are pretty good at it. But it is not possible to do it perfectly. Flash and CSS/HTML and Photoshop all render text differently. Maybe Adobe has some plan to fix this now that they own Flash and Photoshop, but for now? Not possible. It’s never gonna be perfect. Leading in Flash is a dodgy proposition, let alone such intricacies of type as kerning, ligatures and tracking. I mean, we love this stuff. We grew up with it. But for now, it’s not something we can really do much with. We’re sorry. Here and there, yeah, in certain situations, sure, but not always.

Flash Intros

Ahh, the Flash intro. It’s like the “Freebird!” or websites. Often invoked, seldom usefully. Historically, the flash intro was invented to be a lightweight animation that allowed the rest of the site to load, without using loading bars. Now, we have people making intros that require their own loading bar, and then the site also has a loading bar. Oh, and EVERYBODY clicks the skip button. Let’s not waste too much time on these. They alienate the more technically-savvy of your audience (which may or may not matter much, depending on your product), and in this Web 2.0 world, they look kind of ridiculous. Let’s avoid them unless there’s a very, very good reason.

Ecard Functionality

Ah, the old “send-to-a-friend.” Maybe this isn’t for art directors so much as account people, but let’s mention it here. We all want something to “go viral.” We all want our site/project to be a big hit and for everyone to love it and IM the link to their friends. E-Card functionality, by and large, does not help this. It is a myth. The only people who use e-cards, basically, are spammers. Especially if you put a free form text field in them. Yes, there is a small number of people who will actually email something about your site to a friend, but the vast majority will copy the link from the browser window, and IM it or email it to a friend. This is what you do, this is what we do. We can build this, but think about it – somewhere in this project there’s something else you wish we had more time to work on. Let’s apply our efforts there.

A Note About Shoot Days

Okay, so. Your project includes some internet video. Video! Now we’re on a wavelength where you have some experience. Awesome. We are totally down with deferring to you. If you want, we’ll even not hire a director and you can direct. It’s totally your call.
The a couple things we want to point out:
  • One, read what we wrote up above about our philosophy of internet video. Remember you have more options in some ways than you do with television, and in other ways, fewer options. Remember the budget’s not as deluxe as you might be used to.
  • Be aware of roles. Is this our creative gig or yours? Whose vision is it? Are you there as an observer, or are we? Work with your producer and ours to define, in advance, expectations about how this will go. And again, don’t send out our creative lead to get coffee. God, that sounds awful, but it happens. Buy them beer, they’ll love you. Charge it to the client.
  • Finally, be aware of the technical issues. Regardless of who is directing – you, us, an outside director of yours or our choosing – we assign what we call a video technical director to the shoot. We do this because there are technical issues for the internet, for Flash, for computers, that are different than for your television. Frame Rates might be different. Alpha Channels may need to be preserved. You might even have a weird aspect ratio where the video is tall and skinny. It’s our experience that most ad art directors, and even most video directors and production houses haven’t had a lot of experience with this stuff, so we have this team member on the set to help with those issues. They should be listened to. They are the yin to the director’s yang.

A Note About Copy

Copy, copy. Are you a copywriter? If so, awesome. You know what we’re sayin. Do you have a copywriter partner? Lots of agencies do this. If so, awesome. Do you not have one? If so, again, awesome. We’ll do it for you. Whatever, it’s cool. The part to be aware of is that copy for the web is a ridiculously different beast than copy for anything else. There’s all this instructional copy that needs to be written. Copy needs to be written for very exacting lengths. Changing the leading to fit isn’t always an option. Even when a job has an agency copywriter, we find it useful to add a few hours to the project to ensure that the annoying copy is taken care of. The “click here,” and “select up to four items from the list at right, command-click to select multiple items.” Type stuff is taken care of. Unless you absolutely, definitely want to do it yourself, and if so, man, it’s all yours. We care about copy on the web greatly, though, and hate to see a project suffer from too much or too little copy, or not the right tone, or copy that does not aid in making the site easy to navigate. Let us help you. And let’s not forget.

A Few Other Notes

Here are a few other tips and comments various barbarians thought you might want to keep in mind:
  • From a creative standpoint, there’s no such thing as a minigame. While scope certainly varies, every game, no matter how small, still needs its own set of unique assets and programming.
  • Re-rendering 3D and/or aftereffects/motion stuff is not an instantaneous process. And we don’t do it while you sit in big comfy leather couches drinking sodas like you do at finishing houses for broadcast. We can’t afford it, and your bosses would get mad if we charged you for it. It’s a time-consuming, boring process that happens in the dark late at night, and then we can present it to you the next day. Probably on the Web. Bacause that’s where it’s gonna live.
  • There’s an easy to fall into mentality with new-to-interactive art directors where they want to go off and ‘hit one out of the park’ without help from their CD or others at the agency, so they can be a rock star. And in doing so, they cripple the project. If you’re an agency AND and you’re in over your head, talk to your CD. They will still know it was your project, even if you went to them, and probably respect you more for it. We’ve seen jobs where this has been a bit of a problem. On one job, we were unable to help the AD to make any decisions. He was in over his head. After the project ended, we had a conversation with his boss – the big CD, where we discussed all the issues with the project. He said many times, “I wish I were more involved, this could have been great.” That AD asking for help would have made his life better.
If you rip off another site, we won’t do it. Let’s all make something new and awesome instead. We’re all full of ideas. No fear.

1 Ah, poor Freehand
fn2. This is a ridiculously more complicated issue than this sentence makes it sound. We could go on and on. But for our purposes, here, this is what you should take away.