When someone asks what I do, I usually say I'm a brand designer. It's the easy answer. The real answer is that I'm a Creative Director, and the title carries more than most people outside the industry would guess.
Creative Direction is, in my opinion, the most important role in our industry and the least taught. The ladder is well-marked at the bottom; junior designer, senior designer, art director. But somewhere on the way up, the instructions stop. You're expected to figure the rest out on real projects, with real teams, with real consequences.
I started learning what the role actually demands during my internship at Imaginary Forces.
Still from Pierre Castillo Bernad
I was 22 and chasing my favorite director, Alan Williams. He represented everything I wanted to be; genuine, technically brilliant, gushing with creativity. I was lucky enough to work on his team and even help win the pitch for the Anne with an E opening titles for Netflix. It was the kind of moment 22-year-old me had dreamed about.
One night we were deep in a deadline. The project was due the next day, and the studio had thinned out by the time the clock hit 10 PM. Alan and I were still pushing frames around, locking the last details before delivery.
At one point he glanced up from his screen and said, quietly, that he wished he could be home with his son. He didn't say it bitterly; he said it the way someone says it when they love their work and love their family and the math between the two doesn't always add up.
I sat with that for a long time.
Until that moment, I had built a fantasy of what being a Creative Director was. I imagined waking up, pouring a coffee, sitting in front of a blank page with a paying client on the other side, and watching ideas fly unto the page effortlessly. No politics. No timelines. No misdirected feedback. No 10 PMs.
Alan's life was, by every measure I could see, the dream version of the role. He was directing world-class work for world-class clients. And even at the top of that mountain, the job asked things of him that the fantasy never mentioned.
A few weeks later I read an article by Joey Korenman about creatives who spend years climbing the ladder only to reach the top and realize they'd picked the wrong mountain. Something in me settled. I still wanted to be a Creative Director. I just wanted to become one with my eyes open.
Here's what I've come to believe almost a decade in.
The Creative Director role isn't a graduation. It's a different craft entirely. It's less about being the best designer in the room and more about three specific competencies that nobody puts in a syllabus. Most of the frustrating CDs I've worked with have been missing one or two of them. The great ones, the Alans of the industry, have all three.
In the next issue, I'll break down those three competencies. They're the same ones I now look for in every CD, ACD, and ECD I work with or hire. Some of them aren't obvious. All of them are teachable.
If you're a CD, an aspiring one, or a creative working under one who frustrates you; reply and tell me which part of the role gives you the most trouble. I'll prioritize that one in the breakdown.
The ladder is real. The instructions just haven't been written down yet.
Let's start writing them.