Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Well I guess that depends on how much production your department engages in on a day-to-day basis.

If it comes down to time limitations and opportunity costs -- certainly have the director look over the larger -- more important accounts (or campaigns) and have the 2nd tier of seniors look at the less important campaigns/accounts. All accounts are important I know -- just prioritise where necessary.

In my Director experience I have always had a firm grip with everything that left my department and for good cause too considering I would pick up on mistakes and branding issues.

Levon
The Place Marketing Group

Well, ideally the director should have a pulse on all the work thats going on. You could allocate work in the sense that maybe s/he gets involved at a strategy stage and not execution.

Being a 6 person team of creative people, the director should ideally divide time between the various projects that are going on. Some should be reviewed at inception on the direction of the work , others at completion when the brief is very clear.

Define-Analyze- Improve- Final could be the 4 steps of any creative work.

Each project's CTQ( critical to quality) stage should be identified and director should review that stage.

Dear,

The Art Director being the lead role should be of very creative mindset with excellent co-ordination and motivation abilities. The functions are related and relevant and should be guided and supervised overall by the Art Director. It may not be required that all the work shoud be reviewed by that person. If the volume of work is so much it may not be possible so. But, he would set guidelines and brief the team on each and every theme or assignment. The outcomes could be reviewed by him before finalising.

As you have lots of assignements pending, the lead person should concentrate on more important assignments that you feel are critical. Further, by virtue of the experience that the Art Director brings with him/her, he/she should be able to identify soon what are functions could be delegated to whom and what assignments he himself has to review at every stage.

The key is having the right person for the job.

Best Wishes,

kannan

A Creative leader needs to glance over most anything that goes out ... because even mundane work has the agency's name on it. Quality should go across the board regardless of size, because small jobs can turn into big accounts. That's how companies grow. If it is a matter of maintaining a look, then it won't take more than a minute or two. As for the rest of it, a proof reader should go over all work to catch any little problems that pop up. It's all about balancing excellence with cost.

The last post seems to confuse an art director with a quality controller.

Some design jobs are just that: design. It needs to be done professionally, accurately and to the client’s wishes.
An art director is a developer of concepts, of the bigger picture, who examines the product and extrapolates core value, personality and philosophy from it.

E.g. A designer tasked with creating promotional art work for a toothpaste product might create a proposal using clean type, choosing a background color that is fresh, and source some stock photos of mouths, teeth and laughing models.

An art director would take a step back and look for the bigger picture, perhaps device a concept that expresses the importance of the smile. Smile as communication. What does your smile say about you? That you are powerful? Happy? Confident? Amused? The art director might further develop this concept expressing how your smile symbolizes healthy teeth and gums, and relate that back to personality types. He might come up with categories of smiles, and choose to separate the different toothpaste products accordingly.

So my answer is: during busy periods, let your art director take care of those jobs that require concepts rather than down and dirty design. He or she should be the first one involved and maintain the team’s focus on expressing these concepts in an aesthetical and consistent way.

And remember, the most important brand he will manage is your own!