How To Be An Art
Director.

I have been fortunate in my
career to work with four
excellent art directors. Three were certified legends and one is most surely destined to be. Bob Giraldi, Helmut Krone, Bob Wilvers and Angela Glenn. This is the sum of what I have learned just by being in the presence of these gifted practitioners.

Bob Giraldi showed me the
importance of personal style. He was the epitome of what it meant to be an Italian Art Director at a major Madison Avenue agency (Y&RNY) in
the 1970s. The tailoring from Roland Meledandri, known to those who knew as "The Surgeon." Beautiful
chocolate suede blazers,
over $500 Stefano Ricci
silk shirts and Fiorucci
tailored jeans. This was the
look that personified the
creative revolution and
brought an end to the
dominance of the man in the grey flannel suite on
Madison Avenue.

From Giraldi I learned
that you could have a job and a career and the two need never have anything to do with each other. While Bob held forth on Met Life at Y&R he also created one of the greatest schools for advertising creatives the world has ever seen. The School of Visual Arts. And when he and Phil Suarez broke off from Y&R to start Giraldi Films, I was proud to bring them my idea for
developing commercials with multiple vignettes. Bob helped me bring that concept to life for Band-Aid Brand and Sanka Brand and started a style of
commercial that is still going
strong today.

From Bob Giraldi I learned to make everything in the television frame add to the
story. If it doesn't communicate something about whom, what or where, get rid of it. I also learned to keep the composition of the video frame somewhat off center. People pay more
attention to something that is not quite perfect.

Helmut Krone taught me the importance of exercising absolute control over every
aspect of the visual process.

Never trust a photographer to get the picture right. Control the casting. Control the lighting. Control the composition. Control the printing of the selected image.

"The photographer is not your friend. The photographer is your tool. No more or less important than your Xacto Knife," is how Helmut put it. "Never trust a designer or typographer with the look of an ad. They are to well- mannered to ever attract
any attention." And so he would make me send out headlines to be photo reduced by 3/16ths,
just so I could replace the dots over the I's and the periods with those that were of a more suitable proportion to the weight
of the type. "Never set anything smaller than 14 pt type." Was another Helmut Krone edict. "This is advertising, not whispering".

Helmut Krone defined the look and feel of modern day advertising with his page designs for Volkswagen
and Avis. Every time he
designed an ad he would make 3" high thumbnail stat of it and post it on the wall. "To remind myself to never make that mistake again." By the time I began working for him at Case & Krone there were more than a thousand thumbnails mounted in ramrod precision on his cork-tiled wall. Not one was remotely the same as another. From Helmut Krone I learned
that there was a craft to making an ad.

And if the Art director didn't care about that craft than nobody else would give a damn either. I also learned that typography is a lost art and letterforms and typefaces can become a distraction to the energy of the message. Helmut believed strongly that after Futura and Goudy, typefaces degenerated sharply and were hardly worth contemplating. Thirty years later VW is still using Futura in all of their advertising.

What Matters To Me:

VirtuReality: Navigating The
Emerging Market Mindscape
By Ray Poder

Last week a Kwik-E-Mart opened around the corner.
You know, the one from the imaginary world of The
Simpsons? Of course the clever branding is not lost
on me. Still, I’m fascinated that Kwik-E-Mart is a “real”
venue, the Geico Cavemen have their own sitcom, and
fictitious TV character blogs are things that real viewers
can comment on. Somewhere between singing along
with the intro to a kitschy TV classic to jones-ing for our
“Crackberry” it has already happened. You don’t have
to be a Twitter-head or a Second-Lifer to see the
melding your real and virtual experiences into one.
Our consciousness is increasingly occupied by the
same mental constructs in both the physical
world, and the virtual media and communication world
we all relate to and connect with. In other words, we
are all living in VIRTUREALITY, the experiencing of
both the REAL and VIRTUAL at the same time,
characterized by the following:

-Non-linear experiencing of time and place in multiple
dimensions.
-Hyperlocal connecting of physical objects with virtual
identities and vice versa.
-Digitizing our actions towards understanding the
impact of our decisions.

Each time you think about a brand, relate to a celebrity
as if you “know” them, believe the value of your
investments based on “imagined” future earnings,
communicate with a screen or a fancy piece of wired
plastic, wish you could “undo” or “rewind” a physically
real experience, you are in essence merging your
mental constructs of meaning into VirtuReality.

The Non-Linear Experiencing of Time
We’re all familiar with reruns of episodic television,
“retro” fashions and products, pop culture references
being more common than historical ones and bygone
eras forever captured on celluloid, vinyl and now digital
music and video. But what happens now that we’re all
media producers? The effect of recordable experiences
by anyone and everyone seriously puts chronological
consciousness in question. Today, TV Land viewers can
already transport themselves to the past in two
dimensions, so what’s the compounded effect of multi-
dimensional, multi-sensory experiences widely
available?

The proliferation of Lifecaching, along with technologies
like Brain-to-Computer UIs, geotagged innovations like
Photosynth, essentially change how we experience
any given time and space through input from everyone.
As long as an experience has a recorded reference point,
the reality of being able to transport yourself with any
time and space known to anyone is soon becoming a
readily available reality. Even before that happens, just
consider our use of hyperlinks now. Isn’t a link both
the past (produced earlier) and the future (outcome
dependent on your decision to click or not click) to
arrive at the present?

The Hyper-Connecting of Our Physical Reality
Bruce Sterling’s visionary blog post in a recent issue of
Wired is not that far from the reality now being cultivated.
As more physical locations are referenced with data
points such a Google Earth and related mapping
mash-ups, the real and virtual increasingly coexist on
the same conscious plane. RFID and smart dust tagged
objects are no longer science fiction, but factual matters
of efficiency from both enterprise to households. When
things in the physical world have virtual counterparts
and vice versa, the mental and physical constructs not
only interrelate, but become interdependent on each
other.

For example, in a hyperlocal world, your decision to buy
something or patronize a restaurant might very well be
dependent on the “vibe” you sense from multitude of
geotagged reviews for that particular physical entity.
Just as our natural ecosystem negotiates supply and
demand to maintain homeostasis, a world with
connected spaces and objects represent the same for
the market ecosystem. That brings us to next emerging
phenomenon:

The Understanding of The Measurable Impact of Our
Decisions
Both real and virtual real-time information connected to
points of reference, lets us better understand the impact
of our decisions. We are actually living through that
right now.

We can check our account balances on the mobile,
monitor the response to our creative output on social
networks, buy services like Airfare based on real-time
supply and demand and even our carbon footprint at
each purchase point, and that’s only the beginning...

Soon, the idea of advertising becomes replaced by the
idea of recommendations by someone whose agenda
you can verify by a multitude of measurable factors.
Advertisers can no longer say one thing and do
something else. That’s over. It’s over because the next
generation of collective decision making tools like
Vosnaps, Diggs, Rapleafs and Attap’s Riffs can instantly
tell us whether or not it’s true.

Next week: Part 2: Marketing 3.0

NOTE: Ray Podder works with emerging brands to dream up the next ideas to make our lives easier, more enjoyable, more connected to each other and hopefully better than before. He uses his vision and thinking as a designer, strategist and entrepreneur to create the when, now. To learn more, please visit GROW.

Bob Wilvers taught me to realize that advertising could change the world. I had no idea the role that the things I did for a living had far reaching consequences in the world beyond my office overlooking Central Park. No idea what so ever. It wasn't until I began to work on bringing Ford Motor Company back from the dead at Wells, Rich, Greene that I began to understand the impact of what I did for a living. And how much those skills were worth on the open market. Bob Wilvers had done the same thing for Alka-Seltzer that we were doing with Ford Motor Company. Putting a moribund brand on life support and pumping the lifeblood of creativity and excitement back into its faltering heart. Wilvers knew what it took to turn things around.

"You have to connect with people emotionally, not just logically," is how he put it to me late one night. And then he went on to tell me about the factory workers and widowed stockholders and railroad men who were all holding their breath waiting for us to come up with a solution to get Ford back on its feet. Not just to sell more cars, but to sell more stock. It was Bob Wilvers who revealed to me the connection between Madison Avenue and Wall Street. And so it was that I began to realize the impact of a visual solution that stuck in the mind long after the words had faded from memory. I can still remember the image of the huge Ford logo backlit by the sun as it rose over the vast ocean below in the double-page spread that kicked off our campaign in the Wall Street journal. Two weeks before the campaign launched I had taken out a second mortgage on my brownstone and dumped the lot of it into Ford shares. One year after our campaign broke Ford stock split 4:1. thank you Bob Wilvers wherever you are.

Angela Glenn was my partner in the Gasp Company, llc and the only person I ever gave up my art direction control to. She is just that good. There are a great many things that I learned from Ms. Glenn about the craft of Graphic Design. When we first started working together I told her it was my belief that graphic designers were worth little more than the arranging of deck chairs on the Titanic. Of course her opinion of my art direction was that it was careless and unsophisticated. And she was right on both counts.

I had never really embraced the surfer style deconstructed looks of Mike Salisbury, Émigré, David Carson and the rest of the Art Center Mafia. I was firmly rooted in my New York agency style to ever give it a second thought. Then I came West to work and suddenly my work started to look "dated." And in fact it was as the West Coast agencies began to dominate all that defined the cutting edge. So getting to learn everything from scratch was a great opportunity, even though I would never admit it at the time.

Angela taught me about taking the time to do it right. She taught me to see the colors in-between the colors that bring a color palette to life. She taught me to open up the type and let it breathe life into the look. She taught me to take the time to look through the thousands of ugly type faces for the ones that had character and style all their own.

Did I mention taking the time to do it right?

Of all the things I have learned from all the great art directors I have worked with, that was the most valuable lesson of all. As a result, my work with Angela Glenn will always be the work of which I am most proud. It will never win an award. It will never be seen by millions. But it will remain for me the closest thing to art that I have ever had the honor to be a part of. Not a day goes by that I don't think, "How would Ag approach this?" and feel the loss of never again knowing for sure.