Some days ago, I was playing with an app called NGL, or as I called it: the grandson of formspring.me.

Someone asked for my recommendation as a former Art Director for a course in that field, saying it would be better if it were online.

I’ve never thought that before… how, nowadays, a person learns about art direction? To be honest, I studied it by mistake, I wanted to be a Copywriter, but in that time (circa 2001), I just wanted to make ads.

Literally, an Art Director makes ads, and that was the recommendation when I asked my best friend. However, it was Copywriting that I really wanted to work in.

Long story short, I understood that conceptualization must come from a Copywriter – Art Director duo. Sadly, Costa Rica wasn’t working in that way at that time; therefore, I’m sure that neither is Central America right now.

I worked in that field for 5 years.

I must admit it was difficult at the beginning. How do you get so many ideas for different brands? Every day was a challenge because it was in a time that was a ‘print era’, where you had an opportunity every day to have your work in the hands of a lot of readers.

Continuing with the main topic of this, what could I recommend to a stranger who wants to study Art Direction? Well, after a minutes I answer and my wife read it and recommended me to write this post.

More that a course, I recommend the same way that I learned. This is the way:

1. Buy all the Luerzers Archive magazines that you can find. It doesn’t matter what year they were printed. You just have to study every ad so deeply by industry and category. You need inspiration about what your business is about and this magazine is the best library where you can find the most amazing world wide work. It doesn’t matter the year, you always are going to find and admirable execution, impossible for the industry and award winners.

2. You have to watch every Tim Burton film focused in the art direction and how every little detail is conceptualized according to the topic. Everyone knows that Tim Burton after “Big Fish” came fro the top to the pit. Not every movie after that one, has what the ones before got. Obviously is so subjective, but one thing everybody has to admit about him is that the art direction is always perfect. Every little detail has a reason to be in the movie. Even Dumbo.

3. You must try to copy (yes! Copy!) every piece of art of your favorite artist, per example, you can copy “Kiss II” from Lichtenstein to understand how he came to get that amazing work (it’s my favorite from him). Here you’ll find a lot of troubles and issues to understand the way your fav artist had to get a piece from his own. This is helpful for two reasons: the first, you understand about colors, forms, thoughts this person lived in this journey and secondly, it’s your favorite piece of art, how don’t you tried this before?

4. You must read “Sin City” by Frank Miller, then watch the two movies and try to match every scene according to the graphic novels. Miller once said that making the movie was not difficult to start because they already have the storyboards, got it? Look at something in paper and later looking the image in movement is priceless. Try it. It works with book adaptations also.

5. Repeat steps 2 to 4 at least 10 times, but change by adding Tarantino, Eisner, Robert Rodriguez, Brian De Palma, and as many directors, writers, or cartoonists as you can find. Of corse! There’s a lot of great people doing movies, graphic novels, so you can make the same exercises again and again, and that it’s the magic of this, art direction is everywhere, and you have to live it.

6. Apply this to advertising without fear of making the logo bigger. The logo pays the ad, don’t forget that! Well, the question was about this topic in advertising and it’s the field I can teach about, my experience has been here. So many times, we fight because our bosses or clients or both of them want the logo bigger, that’s not a problem and it doesn’t have to be a fight, this is advertising, it’s not art. If you want to do some art, become an artist.

If you take my ads, you can see so many references: from “Carmen Miranda” in “The Mother of Fruits” to “The Hot Chick” in “Puntanity Sula”. If you have a lot of references inside your head, you can connect the dots to go outside the box.

And that’s it. It worked for me, especially the 5th step. If you want to add something to this process, you’re more than welcome!

Remember that studying Art Direction is not free; you have to invest time. Thus, I’ve always said Art Direction is a way of life, not just a profession. Try to live it from the moment you start dressing yourself in the morning.