BUT ISN'T THAT YOUR JOB?

The other day we had the privilege of a listening to a lecture by Craig Oldham (designer at Music studio) entitled But Isn’t That Your Job? It was a great incite into the relationship between how art director and illustration work with once another following six projects, each with different artists. The first four illustrators were part of a campaign promoting the rise of Manchester City football club through four posters of their key players.

The work was created by (in clockwise, from top to bottom) Michael Gillette, Chris White, Todd Slater and Shepard Fairey.

Craig came across as being a very genuine and down to earth chap from my side of the hill and definitely wasn’t afraid to voice his opinion. The talk opened my eyes to the role of an art director and cleared up any stereotype people might have of them.

He described the full ins and outs of a job stating with finding the right man right through to negotiating payment with either the artist themselves or an agency. He definitely showed that when an art company is picked to execute a job that they really care about the end result so that it suits the clients demands and not just their own. It was dead interesting and really informative especially at the end when he answered questions from the group and touched on the subject of presenting work to an art director.

We were all set a brief to design the lecture poster for Craig's talk with the chance to win a set of the Man City posters and some pretty cool books. The only limitations we faced were the usage of only two colours and had to include relevant typography. I decided to do some research by looking on Craig's website where there's quite an in depth section about his likes, dislikes and hobbies. I went for the standard weird approach and clocking it said he liked cups of tea, Prince and the fact he's from Yorkshire, I tried to combine the three together. My final image consisted of Prince rising from the steam of a cup of tea, with a Yorkshire rose in the foreground. It was me being a bit weird and didn't really turn out how I planned in my head but struggled with the hand generated typography. My poster can be seen below. Needless to say I didn't win but hadn't much hope behind it.