Well, right this second, not a lot. But, as Baldrick would say, ‘I have a cunning plan’.

I want this blog to be a place for the open discussion of good and bad creative work (some of which may well be my own). Nothing new there then, but I wouldn’t be a very good Creative Director if I didn’t have an opinion (or two) on the advertising I see day in day out.

I also want to offer some advice to young creatives trying to break into an industry that is notoriously difficult to crack. I’m not saying I have all the answers, far from it, but I do have some. Whether anyone wants to listen to them is a different matter. I guess only time will tell.

So, that was it. My first post. Went quite well I thought…

Saturday at Illuxcon began at the crack of noon. You know us artist types and early mornings! I started the day off by watching a painting demo by Donato Giancola on Portrait Painting in Oil. There is nothing like watching a master at work. I was so impressed by his demo that I plan to purchase his video on oil painting.

After the demo I started wandering the show room floor talking with as many different artists and art directors as I could. I really appreciate everyone that took the time to talk with me and I have a few highlights to share.

I’ll start with Stephan Hickman, who was the featured artist at Dragon Con back in 2008. He’s the reason I went to the first Illuxcon and one of the first people to ever review my portfolio. When my wife and I talked with Stephen back at Dragon Con it came out that Stephen had spent some time in his youth in the Philippines. For those who don’t know my wife is Filipino and she and Stephen really hit it off. At Illuxcon last year my wife brought a book on Tagalog (Filipino dialect) to give to Stephen, but he had to cancel at the last second. This year my wife sent me with the book and I was able to deliver it for her and thank Stephen in person for inviting me to the first Illuxcon.

I made sure to talk with Donato Giancola. After all the great seminars I had been to where he was speaking I wanted to get his thoughts on my portfolio. After flipping through he keyed in on the Harlequin Dancer (this would come to be the norm). He commented that it was my strongest work, and that I was very close. He said that where it fell short was in the Secondary Narrative. Now this was not a term I had heard before so I asked him to explain what he meant by Secondary Narrative. Here is what he explained:

“To take the piece to the next level you need to really push the concept of what will happen next in the story. Think about where the character is going, what the character is doing, and what will happen immediately after the scene shown in the image.

In your Harlequin piece you immediately ask why is she pointing? Is she leading an army or a small band of heroes? Why is she on that rock, yes it looks cool, but there is nothing in the piece to explain the background story. The Primary Narrative is cool dancer heroine, with a detailed costume, in a dynamic pose. The Secondary Narrative fills in the details.”

At this point I had never had anyone explain this concept so clearly and concisely. Donato just laid it all out in the open in a way that seemed so simple. In that moment he changed the way I think about art and composing an image. Needless to say I was floored!

Steve Ellis and Sam Flegal

One of my biggest art influences right now is Steve Ellis, and I was very excited to learn that he had arrived late to the show. I’d been keeping an eye on his booth waiting patiently until he was all set up, at which point I rushed over (what can I say I’m an art fan boy). I met Steve last year at Illuxcon where I really enjoyed his demo on composing an action scene (read more here). Over the last year I’ve been sending Steve updates as I ad new pieces to my website. My most recent work has only just been added to my website, and I haven’t sent out an update yet, so I asked Steve to review my portfolio. He keyed in on the Harlequin piece like most, but he also noted the Manananggal (Filipino Vampire). He encouraged me to do more Filipino monsters, which I plan to do, and also encouraged me to let my style come out more in my work. He stated that, “If you asked most fantasy artists to draw a dragon they would all look more or less the same, but if he asked me to draw one he had a feeling it would turn out to be a gross worm thing with drool and blood pouring out of its mouth.” He then explained that being different in the art field is not a bad thing and that I should focus on cultivating that rather than hiding it. He then challenged me to do a piece the quality of the Harlequin Dancer in traditional media rather than digital.

I then proceeded to buy all sorts of goodies from Steve. His new comic trade paperback, High Moon, was out. So I picked that up. I also got his new art book Scream: Draw Classic Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies, Monsters, and More. What enticed me about Scream was that Steve explained both his traditional art process and digital art process, showing how both media help the other. I plan on doing a review of the book soon, so keep an eye peeled. In addition I purchased two prints. Now what’s cool about Steve is that he does little drawings on the inside cover whenever he sells a book. He drew a werewolf on the inside of my copy of High Moon, but what was really special to me was that he did a Zombie Portrait of yours truly on the inside of my copy of Scream. HOW FREAKIN’ COOL!!!

Zombie Portrait of Sam Flegal by Steve Ellis

At this point I had a LOT to chew on so I took a break and tried to write down as much as I could in my notebook. Let’s us take another break too…

Join me soon for Illuxcon Saturday Part 2!

HAZE is a legendary street artist who moved on to become an acclaimed art director. We were fortunate enough to get to see some of his work in person and meet the man himself! Check out our photo gallery:

Timeless, sexy, fluid, simply fantastic! I do love the Lanvin silouhette, congrats Mr. Elbaz!

Related posts:

Lanvin: Fall-Winter 2009/2010 

Shoes: Spring-Summer 09 Selection 

Antwerp: Fashion, Shopping & Café

Below are links to my work. This is only a snap shot of what I have done, so if you want to see more just ask.

>Digital work 

>TV reel

>Print work

>Digital work Part 2 

A beat of ”Match Point“? Congrats Mr. Gaultier!

Related posts:

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Look Books Women’s Collection Spring-Summer 2009 

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Photos : Madame Figaro / Lay out : Mademoiselle Le K

Six months ago, I graduated from TCU and jumped right into this internship; I didn’t know what to expect, and I definitely did not anticipate how much I would learn.

Working here at Zag is not like your typical internship. It’s a real job and everyday is a learning opportunity, and more importantly, a chance to get better at what you do.

Here are a few of the many things I have learned at Zag:

Control your stress, don’t let it control you. As a designer, some days the stress can be overwhelming.  You have to meet a deadline by a certain time, and your design ideas don’t seem to work. These days, stress can start to control you. Once that happens, you’re not focused anymore and your work suffers. So even on those high-pressure days, take a moment to step away and take a deep breath. Give yourself a pep talk or take a short walk. I’ve learned that just 5 minutes is enough to calm down and get back to work.

Inspiration is everywhere. Sometimes, your mind is exhausted and it’s hard to come up with ideas and/or designs. You feel like you hit a wall and a project suddenly starts to seem impossible. I have learned that ideas and designs don’t always spontaneously appear — sometimes you have to look for them. Talk to people around the office; look at books; browse the Internet or just stare outside the window (my favorite). If you give it a little bit of time, one of those things will trigger a good idea instead of settling for a mediocre one that you forced out of yourself.

Lastly, I’ve learned that it’s okay to ask for help. Here at Zag we are very lucky to have GCG and Site Smart Interactive employees as resources. Their opinions and guidance have been crucial to our success, because we are all very young, and most importantly, we are all still learning about this business. I’m the kind of person that when I run into a problem, especially in web design, I want to figure it out by myself no matter how long it takes so that I can truly learn how to fix it. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the time to do that, so instead of spending over an hour figuring out a code, I can just walk down the hall and ask someone from Site Smart Interactive in a matter of minutes.

Don’t forget to come back tomorrow to see what my fellow designer Rolando has to say!

Remi/Rough aka Remdog
manie aussi bien l’art du spray (sous l’apparence de Remi/Rough)
que celui de la MPC (sous le pseudo de Remdog).

+ Remdog, Shadow In Your Rearview EP

[roughe.com / remdog space / myuzyk.net / 2600recordings.com]

WRITER’S WARNING: This is a long post. If you’re not crazy about reading long online posts, download the post as a low file size PDF.

_____

A black book (or web page) is opened.

Samples of creative work are viewed.

The book or page is closed.

Decisions are made.

Rinse. Repeat.

As a creative professional and educator, I have always pondered the meaning and role of the creative portfolio, what it means to those who are creative professionals, and also to those who are not—those who interact or recruit creatives. For art directors, copywriters, and designers in multiple disciplines, the creative portfolio is their lifeblood. It’s where they show their work. It’s their default resume and principle means by which to land jobs. And, in the end, it defines their careers. The reason it defines their careers is because creative directors, hiring managers and recruiters use the “book” or portfolio to judge a creative pro’s worth. But how much can we really tell about someone from their portfolio, and how defining is it? To me a creative portfolio is solely this:

An artifact that illustrates the degree to which a creative person has been “allowed” to be creative.

Since I put allowed in quotes, let me define it a bit. Unless you are a street-corner musician, a poet or a self-styled starving artist, creative professionals are almost always more obligated to be professional than creative. They work for design companies, ad agencies, or corporate in-house creative teams. This means that their creativity is constrained by their employer. Creative people are further constrained by the clients of their employers. For services companies, this means external clients. For internal groups, this means other functional units within the company. In effect, the sum of these constraints equals the degree to which a creative person is allowed to be creative.

Process and Environment

These constraints don’t simply lie in the necessity to conform to a creative brief, design specs or customer requirements. From a broader perspective, all individuals who judge the work of the creative person subjectively form constraints. These include creative directors, account executives, marketing clients, engineers, technologists and many more, including the end-customer if a company is creating correctly. In the end, the work of the creative is not solely a measure of their creativity, but also an artifact of their particular environment’s creative process. It’s important to note that when I say environment, I don’t mean the process itself, but the space within which the process acts itself out. Let me illustrate this with an example:

I

A copywriter and art director team, from a Chicago advertising agency, come up with an idea for a 30-second television commercial for a consumer package goods (CPG) client.

II

The idea is shown to their creative director, the creative director’s boss, three account executives, and two clients who are marketing managers/directors. The client then takes the idea and shows it to four more people including their boss. The idea gets altered in numerous ways to meet the ideals and requirements of all who have touched it. Next it goes into production. A director, actors, producers, editors and numerous others touch it and alter it before it is a final product that goes into the copywriter’s and art director’s creative portfolio.

In the example above, the first part contains the environment in which the creative process is acted out

1. Chicago

2. Ad agency

3. CPG client

The second part is the process. Most creative professionals understand this process, or one similar to it. Most consider this a system that is acceptable and known. And though creatives, being creative, might occasionally moan about it, they mostly resign themselves to its machinations. However, what very few people consider is how drastically this scenario changes when you change the first part, the environment. So let’s take the exact same process and make the following environment replacements:

Chicago to Portland, Oregon
CPG Client to Athletic Shoe Client

Now, even though the process is probably very similar, the environment has drastically changed. For instance, Chicago has traditionally been a conservative advertising city. Portland has not. CPG clients are often conservative marketers. Athletic shoe makers typically are not. CPG companies often flock to Chicago agencies due to their CPG expertise and conservatism. Athletic shoe companies do not. CPG companies typically employ the kind of person who can understand and conform to the sort of strategic branding these companies do. Chicago ad agencies typically hire creative professionals with portfolios that fit their current client’s style.

Change the Environment, Change the Creative Product

Now imagine the process above taking place in the new environment. If the exact same copywriter and art director were involved, with the exact same process, would the outcome (creative portfolio artifact) be different?

Faster than you can say swoosh. You can bet your recession-proof savings on it.

Country, city, type of office, type of client; these are the environmental elements that designers, art directors and copywriters work within, and that contribute to the formation of their creative product, and thus their creative portfolio. And this is why a creative portfolio only tells part of the story regarding an individual’s creativity and creative potential.

Throughout my 20-year creative career I have known and worked with numerous wildly creative individuals who do NOT have wildly creative portfolios. I’ve also known many creatives who blossomed and evolved once their environment changed. For some it was simply a change of workplace. For others, a whole new city or country or client industry precipitated the evolution.

Ive League

There’s a rather famous example of this not many people know about. The lead Industrial Designer at Apple, Johnathon Ive, has become a legend for his design and design stewardship of Apple’s groundbreaking iMac, iPod and iPhone designs. But Ive wasn’t always the hero at Apple. In fact, during the years when Steve Jobs was away from company, Apple took a nosedive, and the company was at its all-time lows in stock price. Despite the fairly wide acceptance of Mac by creative professionals, Apple looked as if it was going the way of the Dodo. At that time, Ive was there (he started in 1992), designing, and building a (mostly unimpressive) creative portfolio.

Then his environment changed.

Steve Jobs returned in 1997 and put the focus of the company on industrial design. He opened the floodgates for folks like Ive, a brilliant designer, to show just how creative he can be. This one change in environment changed a middling creative talent (if you only looked at his creative portfolio) and allowed him to achieve a level of creativity closer to his potential.

IVE BEFORE JOBS' RETURN

A creative portfolio is an artifact that illustrates the degree to which a creative person has been “allowed” to be creative.

IVE'S PORTFOLIO AFTER JOBS' RETURN

Seeing Behind the Portfolio

The implications for this sort of perspective about creative portfolios stretch from creator to creative co-worker to recruiter. I think that most creatives would agree with much of what I’ve outlined, perhaps even with an apathetic shrug. But to those who float the periphery of the creative world, these notions are perhaps far more important.

Outside of creative professions, job hunters are judged on their resume, their experience, their education and how they come across in an interview. This is the normal world. But not for creatives. Creative professionals are mostly, and often solely, judged on the content of their portfolios. Given this inevitability, I would plead with those who critique portfolios and make hiring decisions (yes, you too, creative directors) to open their minds to a creative’s potential as much as their portfolio. I humbly request you start with these three simple guidelines that help you see behind the creative portfolio to the real creative professional.

1. Read between the lines.
Look at creative executions with an open mind. Try to see through the end result and consider the process and especially the environment.

2. Listen, don’t look.
Listen to the creative talk about their work and probe deeper into how it got there. Don’t just scan it and take it at face value. Typically, there is far more value hiding behind the face.

3. Remember that creativity is born before it is recruited
Creative professionals are creative by nature first, not profession. What you see isn’t all there is. In fact, the typical creative portfolio is usually just the tip of the creative iceberg.

With these guidelines, I guarantee you will better understand both the work and the mind of the creative professionals you come in contact with, and be able to better gauge creative potential. In today’s creative world there are a handful of wunderkinds out there who are tearing up the awards books, and making names for themselves internationally. But these handful are not the only ones capable of creating extraordinary work, they merely represent the ones who have been allowed to.

Read this post as a PDF

As always, your comments are welcome–BV

Imagine advertising created without copywriters and art directors.  Ads, commercials, designs, logos, even whole campaigns conjured up by hundreds of erstwhile “creatives” out there…somewhere…somehow…

It’s real.  It’s here. 
It’s called crowdsourcing.

The theory behind crowdsourcing is, “if two heads working on an assignment are better than one then, hot damn, 12,000 heads must be the absolute best-est best of all bests.”

There’s even an agency start-up in Colorado, Victors & Spoils, claiming that it generates all its creative output through crowdsourcing.  (Actually, read their fine print and it’s clear that they’re a virtual agency with an all freelance off-site creative department that pitches ideas against each other. Sounds more outsourced than crowdsourced. Nice try, guys.)  There are also several websites offering crowdsourced logos.

Wow, crowdsourcing sure sounds like it’s the goods.  All those heads with smoke coming out of their ears focused on a single creative assignment, it’s a slam dunk.  Right?

Sometimes so.  Mostly, not.

I think crowdsourcing is viable in certain applications. Product naming and product idea generation are successful examples.  But unleashing a mob to do the work of one, two, or three talented creative professionals is counterproductive.

Let’s start with client contact.  Smart, effective creative sparks its genesis with a keen understanding of the client’s marketing problems and objectives.  That means face time with clients, their people and their customers.

Second is incentive.  What some hail as “crowdsourcing” isn’t much more than a contest.  How much “prize money” does it take to make it worthwhile to spend days working on an idea that, in all likelihood, won’t see the light of day?  Are we really attracting the best and brightest?  Those with true creative chops are working elsewhere, either on-staff at agencies or as fulltime freelancers for set project fees.

What if the crowdsource agency decides to combine two or more ideas or tweak a crowdsourced notion into something similar, but not exactly the same?  Who gets paid?  How much?  Why do I see lawyers hovering?

Then there are deadlines.  Can a crowd meet a deadline faster than one or two creative teams?  What if the crowd comes up with crap?  Who’s accountable then?  What about rewrites?

Remember, too, that many great campaigns, spots, ads and designs are created at the last minute or even after.  Bill Bernbach called this “breaking the plate,” which happened when many of the most famous Doyle Dane Bernbach concepts sprung to life after press plates were made for print ads.  Bernbach wasn’t shy about scrapping plates and making new ones in service of creating great advertising, which is also great art.

That’s why you won’t see exhibitions of crowdsourced art or One Show pencils awarded for crowdsourced ads any time soon.

More on Bob Devol Communications: http://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/?id=43433055921#/pages/Wilton-CT/Copywriter-Bob-Devol-Communications/43433055921

www.balenciaga.com  

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Antwerp: Fashion, Shopping & Café 

Casba, Tokyo nights: meeting Reiko and MAX 

City Guides Paris, Antwerp & Tokyo: Destinations 

Photos: nymag.com / Lay out: Mademoiselle Le K

People do judge a book by its cover.  Or at least, it’s the cover that gets people to pick up the book in the bookstore and see whether they like it.  Here are rough cover ideas for Two Bad Pilgrims.

Art Director Jim Hoover liked Idea A  I did tight sketches of the boys, the New Worlde mappe and the title type, which Jim put together as a comp.

The boys and the map are painted as a single image.  One last request: show the boys having burst through the map.  The compass rose is a separate piece of art.  The type I inked in as separate black & white art.  Jim Hoover combined these elements into one cover image and added the credits at the bottom.

www.ysl.com

Autres articles: 

Yves Saint Laurent: my tribute 

 Look Books Women’s Collection Spring-Summer 2009 

Look books Paris Women’s Collection Fall-Winter 2008/2009 

City guide Paris: Destinations 

Photos : nymag.com / Lay out : Mademoiselle Le K

My dream career is to work in advertisement. I figured this out last year and also found my dream school that I visited last spring, Academy of Arts in San Francisco. I had a short conversation there with one of the teachers and he was a copywriter and really knew what to say. When he asked me why advertisement my answer was:”I always see something in an ad that can be changed or improved”. He liked my answer and after our talk said that I would probably like the school.

I was really close to applying and attending the school but unfortunately it was to expensive when I counted on it. I did not want to take such a big loan when I had the choice of free education here in Sweden. So my plan is to finish my bachelors and then hopefully i’ll build up a masters at Academy of Arts.(if i still want to pursue that career). I just gotta decide; copywriter or art director. And I have no idea.

My favorite blog I follow is Please Copy Me. I recommend it for all of you who have an interest in advertisement.

Pedro Vilas-Boas è un art director portoghese, crea delle immagini davvero interessanti piene di elettricità che rimandano ad un immaginario un pò ‘80es. Nella sua carriera ha collaborato con marchi come Nokia e Carlsberg, con artisti e progetti web.

Nel suo sito personale sono presenti tutti i lavori, un potfolio davvero notevole.

www.emiliopucci.com

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Bottega Veneta: Spring-Summer 2010

Photos: Madame Figaro / Lay out: Mademoiselle Le K