There's a moment on every project where the work either becomes itself or quietly turns into something else. A transition lands wrong. A color choice hardens. A composition drifts. The team keeps moving, but the project starts to lose its center.
When that happens, the temptation is to look at the artist. The real answer is almost always upstream.
The Three Pillars
Creative Direction has three pillars; Translation, Process, and People. They work in unison. None of them stand alone, and weakness in one quietly corrodes the other two. Today I want to talk about Translation, because it's the most visible of the three, and the one I see Creative Directors fumble most often.
By translation I mean the ability to take an emotive goal; a feeling, an intention, a strategic thought you want an audience to have; and convert it into specific, actionable creative decisions an artist can execute. Lighting. Texture. Color. Timing. Scale. Composition. Tension. Restraint.
It sounds simple. It isn't.
Still by Stian Johansen
What Good Translation Sounds Like
To be fair, the issue usually isn’t that CDs can’t communicate clearly; it’s that they’re so stretched across projects that vague feedback has become the default.
I never tell an artist a piece "isn't working" and leave it there. I remind them of the high-level intention of the project, point to the specific component that's pulling against it, and prescribe a direction. Something like; "the transition is feeling too light for a brand that's supposed to feel monolithic. Let's slow it down and add some drag so it lands with more weight."
That's not me shooting from the hip. That's me using earned vocabulary to point an artist toward an emotive target. When you can do this consistently, your artists trust you. They know you've thought about it. They know you're not going to send them on three rounds of revisions because you couldn't articulate what you actually wanted.
What Bad Translation Sounds Like
About four years ago I was brought into a branding project for a security company. The client-side CD asked me to develop my own pitch alongside his. I built mine around the idea of night-vision; the ability to see where others can't. It was the core value proposition of every security company I'd ever studied, and the visual territory was rich.
His pitch was that gold would be really cool.
That was it. No thesis. No emotive goal. No translation from a strategic intention into a creative direction. Just a preference dressed up as a point of view. He had veto power, and he used it. My pitch got killed.
That company is still dripping in golden irrelevance today. Their branding is confusing, forgettable, and headed for a 6-figure rebrand they could have avoided. The artists on that project weren't the problem. The leader was.
The Harsh Part
This is the part I want every CD reading this to sit with.
When a project goes sideways, the instinct is to blame the artist. The animation didn't land. The composition feels off. The brand system doesn't hold. But almost every time I've seen a project miss, I can trace it back to a translation failure at the top. The CD couldn't articulate the emotive goal in technical language the team could act on. So the team improvised. And improvisation without a north star produces noise.
Still by Stian Johansen
A Creative Director without translation is a conductor waving their hands based on whatever thought passes through their head in the moment. The orchestra plays. Notes happen. But there's no song.
A great CD knows that their job isn't to feel things on behalf of the client or the team. It's to convert business and emotive goals into something the team can actually build.
Up Next
In the next issue I'll cover Process. The system that surrounds the translation and protects it from being eroded by client curveballs, squeezed timelines, and the hundred small compromises that quietly kill a project.
Until then, reply and tell me; have you ever been on a project where bad translation cost you the work? I'm collecting examples for a future issue, and yours might make it in.
The translation skill is rare. But it's not magic. It's earned.