Art directing Colman's Mustard.

I am a little concerned with my craft in visual communication, I have been paying too much attention in coming up with ideas that I have lost touch in actually executing them effectivity!

If I want to be the best art director on the planet, I need to start by playing around with loads of different layouts/executions.

Like coming up with ideas a great art director needs to figure how to effectivity layout the idea so it best communicates to the chosen target audience, that means many different layouts to choose from.

Also many of the greats constructed layouts that didn't even look like your typical advertisement, but lets be honest thats on the clients part if he accepted that wit can catch attention instead of saying the logo needs to be much bigger, actually I want it to cover everything.

Anyhow with this concern I have went to be inspired by a man who was the spearhead of art direction when postmodern advertising came on the scene in the 1950s, yes folks that man is Helmut Krone, the god behind the team who gave you the legendary 'Think Small' print ad.

Krone art directed much of the early great postmodern advertising that revolutionised how we saw advertising, so this is a no brainer to be my ultimate reference guide in art direction.

The 'Helmut Krone. The Book: Graphic Design and Art Direction (Concept, Form and Meaning) After Advertising's Creative Revolution.' may be a expensive book but if your like me and looking to hone your craft in advertising to achieve a dream job at a top agency, then this is the bible of art direction.

I hope for this baby to arrive in the post this week!

Anyhow to the point of this post, I did a little art direction playing with layouts on my latest campaign idea 'Colman's Mustard: If you like..'.

I also played with the type a little, not happy with the typeface tho, need to work on my typography.

Out of them I prefer the last one, I think the visual metaphor communicates it being a hot product, we are common with chillies, plus the way the Colman's Mustard is positioned peaking out at the bottom is a clever dynamic of it rising, or giving the visual space to breath while leading the eye from top to bottom.

However its not unique and is a common layout for most art directing, like a idea a layout needs to be worked upon until it becomes great, which means making something fresh that hides the illusion of a commercial. 

I plan to move from the layout pad and marker, and try to really execute my ideas, to show I have a range of skills besides idea generating.

I lost my way at Loughborough University on Graphic Communication in terms of design, time to bring it back, time to bring out the graphic designer to help me art direct!

Thanks for reading.