Art Direction

Art Direction is the process of choosing what sort of mood, feeling and consistency is applied to anything creative.  An Art Director in general directs the vision of a project and the overall appearance of everything in the project. Although they do not necessarily produce the assets directly there influence is key to generating a consistent project and artistic style.  Particular care must be taken to ensure each artist work is interlink able and that they understand what is need to produce concise and useable material within a game. By planning the art direction with the help of concept artists and story boarding an art director can lay out a clear platform on which artists can add appropriate work that will result in a successfully designed and implemented game.

Art Directors are important in developing games because without them the art team and the rest of the development team wouldn’t have set art direction and goals to achieve. This would result in the project being held up and the final outcome not being fluent in design.  Artists are inherently creative and without design constraints this tends to result in them producing work that isn’t consistent and this will affect the end game and people’s opinion of it.

Art directors are responsible for a team as much as any director and have to manage their staff and what they are focused upon.  I feel that being an Art Director may be the most creative position in the art department. It is definitely the most responsible art position, as entire project are reliant on their decisions. If an Art Director doesn’t make sound decisions or creative ones then a project can be unsuccessful and in the worst case scenario a developer can’t go under. So I feel that Art Directors are creative, if not the most creative members of a team, or at least those who make the most important decisions. Generally speaking Art Directors have a great deal of experience in industry or a creative background of many years. So assuming that they have worked from the bottom they have lots of experience and know how to make good creative decisions.

Art Directors in Games aren’t particularly different from those in films, because they are still relied upon to make important artistic decisions and directions; I feel that important qualities that someone needs in order to become an art director are some degree of experience. This could be in are position within the games industry for some period of time. It is important for the person to have some interpersonal skills as they have to lead a team and those who are used to working in a team are obviously going to have some of these traits. They could have been an art director in another creative industry as essential these skills are interchangeable and they would still apply to this position. Being able to control and stich together information and choosing appropriate art direction would also be necessary. Essentially practice and success would be necessary traits to become an Art Director.