Art direction
Process
Against the moodboard
The moodboard is the most reliably misused artefact in our field. It is supposed to align a team on a direction. In practice it usually aligns a team on a set of images they have all agreed to like for different and unstated reasons.
Everyone reads a different thing
Put a photograph of a concrete building on a board and one person sees the material, one sees the light, one sees the composition and one sees the fact that it looks expensive. Six weeks later you present work that honours the material, and three people are quietly disappointed because you did not honour their reading.
Nothing in the artefact prevents this. It is a wall of images with no argument attached, and images without arguments absorb whatever the viewer already believes.
Caption everything or show nothing
The fix is not to stop collecting references. It is to refuse to show any reference without a sentence saying what specifically you are pointing at, and — just as usefully — what you are not. “The grain, not the colour.” “The pacing of the type, not the layout.” “This is what we are avoiding.”
A board of nine captioned images is worth more than a board of sixty uncaptioned ones, and it takes far longer to make, which is the point. If you cannot write the caption you have not decided what you mean yet.
The counter-board
I now bring two boards to every direction conversation. The second one is everything the project could plausibly be mistaken for and should not be. Clients engage with it far more readily than the aspirational board, because it is much easier to know what you do not want.
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I take on a limited number of projects each quarter so every one gets my full attention. Tell me what you’re building and let’s see if we’re a fit.
