And then, um, I ended up really loving design and art directing and decided I wanted to study it. So I didn’t start studying till I was about 24, which I guess is kind of late… by then I really like, I knew what I wanted to do and I was like super committed to achieving it. And then yeah, since I graduated, I was working sort of like full time throughout my degree, just like freelancing and getting as much experience as possible, like offering to help out. Like if I had friends of friends who are musicians, I’d be like, please, can I do your album cover or graphics, do this? Or like, I would just be super enthusiastic to get stuck in. 

Muaz

That’s an important way to get experience right at the beginning. So, yeah, I think, yeah… 

Sophie

Definitely. And I think if you’ve got the time, like you should definitely do it cause there’s no other better experience than to do a live brief, you know? And it’s, it’s the best experience. And when you leave, leave university, at least you’ve got a portfolio with live projects and they’re, you know, not just university briefs. I think it is really important and something that a lot of employers will, will look for as well. But yeah, since then I kind of got into advertising, I was always kind of hesitant to jump into advertising since I left uni. In university, I even like wrote my dissertation around, like, what is good design and you know, what is evil and how designers are kind of like, you know, advertising it’s led by like, sort of like mass consumption, which designers help, you know, so I was very aware that I didn’t want to just be that. 

And I wanted to approach it from an angle of creating change and doing positive things. And my work being like impactful within society and changing culture, which is obviously like harder than. As, as you’re a young kid, you’re like, yeah, I want to make all this change. And like getting into advertising, it’s hard because you know, you’ve got to start at the bottom and work yourself up, but people are listening now. So it’s slowly getting there, but you’ve got to be a part of the change you want to see.

Muaz

I think that making sure that you portray yourself in a way that is in line with your values, you’re actually doing yourself a favor because you it make it easier for the kind of people that agree with you to find you. 

Sophie

Exactly, exactly. And if you’ve got work that speaks volumes about your values and your beliefs, then that’s what you’re going to get hired for again and again and again as well. So don’t be afraid to like, put that message out, like loud and clear. 

Muaz

Perfect. That’s, that’s amazing. And that’s a great journey into advertising. 

Sophie

Yeah, definitely just launch straight in there with a loud mouth.

Muaz

So how did that arc actually work from a skateboarder interested in the creative industries. How did you start approaching advertising roles and start pursuing an advertising career?

Sophie

I was very lucky when I actually, when I was in university, just through friends of friends, I met an amazing woman called Nova Dando. And she is an art director, super talented and has a lot friends who are musicians. And also she did like some advertising work as well. She was freelance and I worked with her and through that, I ended up doing a few advertising jobs for like Nokia, for instance.

And I kind of saw the light and I thought, well, you know, like I’ve written a dissertation on this. It might be a good way for me to kind of get in and see. You know, be, be more hands on and have more of a voice. So I started working for a production side of, I guess, there’s agencies and they’re production houses.

So I worked for a production house called Strange Beast, and they’re a part of Passion Pictures, which are quite big, they’re a massive animation studio. And they do some like live action films as well. Um, Strange Beast does a lot of like illustration and design focused production work. And that was the kind of the bridge, I think, I made into advertising. After that, I went to actual advertising agencies, but Strange Beast work with advertising agencies and directors.

So they kind of like the bridge between that gap of going, okay, an advertising agency needs this work for this client. Strange Beast have got this director, I’ll work with the director and come up with like ideas and, and treatment, creative treatments and stuff and, and go that way. And that was quite a creative route into art direction as well. Because working with directors, you really get an insight into how they work and everyone’s different, you know, some directors are amazing to work with and some directors are just like, you can tell it like a lot goes on in their head and they can’t really get it out. So that was really, really interesting.

And, and then from there, I kind of went into a different advertising agency that specializes more in sort of events and branding. And then into another agency where I kind of got more into sports, which you know, is my background. I used to play football and obviously skateboarding, surfing and everything really.

And so I kind of got put on quite a big sports brand and that agency, which I loved, because I think sport is a great avenue to create social change. And it’s got a lot of amazing messaging that you, that can come through it, you know, like it joins communities worldwide, breaks down barriers really easily. So that was really an exciting adventure for me when I sort of got on that path.

And yeah, I’m still sort of on it. Working for another sports brand at the moment, but I’m still the same, same kind of work. 

Muaz

When you approach a new commission, what is your process and what are the stages involved? 

Sophie

Usually when I approach a commission, I tend to ask a lot of questions. I’m quite into like strategy and psychology and all those kinds of things around design. I read quite a lot of books in it when I was in university. 

So I always like to know why, like what the purpose is. And I want to know what the client wants the end result to be like, what do they want the consumer to walk away thinking or feeling after seeing that advert or that message or whatever. So obviously depending on the brief, how big and how small it is, like, if it’s a bigger brief, you’d get more room to have strategy involved.

If it’s just a small, we need an Instagram post for this, you know, less so, but everything needs to string from something right. And everything is a branch from the brand. So it needs to continue in the same tone of voice. And it needs to, you know, think about the future of what it’s trying to say as well.

So I would spend a lot of time doing that, obviously, if I was in an advertising agency, which, which I am, we have in-house strategists and teams that do, do that. And it would follow like a quite a linear approach of going from brief to strategy from creative to design. 

However, if it’s a solo sort of like freelance project. I would just jump in and get involved in that strategy. I’m quite a, like Jack of all trades type, which I always got advised not to be, but it kind of just made more sense for my brain to think about everything. Yeah. That’s, that’s kind of how I work. I think as well, like the idea needs to be solid. I usually keep going back to the idea, like sometimes I’ll start with like the strategy and then come up with an idea that sort of like works with that.

And then I’ll get into the mock up and then design. I mean, that is the normal linear approach, but quite often I’ll go from strategy to thinking about the output to back to the idea and, and then back to the design again. And then even when I’m almost finished the design I might go back to the idea and like tailor it a bit.

So. I think my process is kind of a bit more chaotic than the straightforward linear approach that most people might take. 

Muaz

Well, I think if a lot of creatives are honest with themselves, some of their best work probably comes when there’s a bit of chaos involved, to be honest.

Sophie

Definitely, definitely. And I did like the best ideas are the most simple, right. And most streamline and the ones that you can communicate within like a sentence or two. So sometimes that comes from going back and really refining it and just stripping away all that extra bit that you’re like actually the art direction doesn’t reflect any of the ideas. So like, it doesn’t need it. Let’s lose it. Like that type of thing. 

Muaz

Perfect. So if you could give us like an example of like, so you mentioned small and big, so like what kind of timelines are involved in this and how much beforehand does someone need to approach either you or an agency to actually get things going?

Sophie

Ooh, that’s quite a hard question. Cause it can be anywhere in like um, from a freelancer. Yeah, exactly, exactly. From a freelance point of view, if the brief was like a rebranding project, for instance, you need quite a lot of, that’s quite a big project. And so you’ll need quite a lot of lead time, you know, I’d say, um, I mean, depending on the size of the agency, if it’s quick, you know, like our new startup, a CBD company that’s coming out and we just need a logo, like there’s millions of those briefs. So can you just do me a logo, uh, you know, for something like that, I would probably say like a week or two full-time on it, because you’d want to do some strategy into their market research. You know, you want to do a good job on this. You don’t just want to make another little icon that doesn’t mean anything that’s gonna get thrown away.

Like, for me, it’s really important to have that strength because then it makes the rest of the branding process easier. So for that, I would definitely say you need like a week, maybe even more of like research and, and just testing time and seeing what the rest of the market is, understanding their clients, understanding their brand and their business and where they want to be in five years.

Because the thing is with clients is that they want to spend as less as possible. But when you look at it from a large angle, like if you go, well, you know, in two years, if you’re going to change your business, this logo, isn’t going to work. Like it’s not going to stick, so they don’t want to have to repay it in two years to redo it all over again.

So it’s kind of about finding a middle ground, I think, between what they’re actually after, their budget and what you think you can like really get the best out of it. So the fast turnarounds, aren’t really like, you know, every, everyone kind of wants that for social, but I think I handle a lot of fast turnarounds in my current job, but it’s only because the brand I work with, I know them now.

So I know the clients, I know where it’s going. I’m aware of like what the clients want, what their market wants, whereas like, so I can handle like a quick turnaround brief from them. Okay. You’ve got three hours. We need to do a reactive post for this tennis player who’s won an event for instance. Whereas I couldn’t do that if the brand was fresh. It would take me a while to learn the brand and then their audience. 

Muaz

It sounds like the process can get quite intense sometimes when you have to have these, almost these conversations that almost need the brands that you’re working with to dig really deep and think about what they actually represent.

Sophie

Totally. Yeah. I give them some really random questions sometimes; I ask them if they were a smell, you know, what would they smell like. And they think that I’m a bit weird, but I think it’s really important to get to the bottom of their brands. Like, and it makes them really think because a lot of the time the client hasn’t even thought about that.

Or thought about where they want to be or where they want to be seen as. As I think design has a big misunderstanding of what it does. I think a lot of the time when people come to me with, you know, that they’ve never worked with a designer before, it’s, it takes a lot for me to have to sit them down and explain the process of design.

It’s not just as easy as, as buying a logo on a website for five pounds. I mean, you can do that if you want, like go for it, but I’m not the right designer if you’re going to do that. 

Muaz

No, no, for sure. I wonder what the smell of my brand would be. What, what would Blazon be? I think it’d probably be like a tangy blueberry kind of smell. 

Sophie

That’s a good answer.

Muaz

I don’t know why that just, yeah, exactly. Just like tangy, really fresh. But, there you go. 

Sophie

Yeah. Something that like strikes people as a bit less center

Muaz

Absolutely. And I just love blue as well. So the color matches that’s why, it goes with the brand.

Sophie

Perfect. That’s the other thing, you know, like colours have a lot of psychology based research into them. So picking your color is another massive minefield. 

Muaz

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s just like, um, people don’t understand, you know, the science around creativity and the psychology behind it. Because, you get people who do like PhD specifically in, in these fields, just to understand what the meaning of all of this is.

And so even though it seems simple, you know, there’s just so many levels to it. And a lot of that sometimes gets lost in translation when you’re talking to a client, I guess. 

Sophie

Yeah, definitely. I think design is one of those things that, you know, like when people buy iPhones and they think that they’re photographers.

When they can get an Adobe license and they think they immediately can be a designer, I think. And I mean, go for it. Like, honestly, like I don’t have any problem with people doing that, but it’s a completely different realm, you know, like for someone that studied it and like cares a lot about it and reads a lot about it and read trends, there’s a lot of thinking involved in it.

And it depends again on what your brief and what the outcome is. Like, sometimes there’s a need for that. Sometimes there’s a need to just, you know, go down the road and shoot something with your iPhone and use that. But sometimes there’s a need to actually get a photographer involved and plan a proper shoot and get everything like, thought about and get an art director on board. There’s different briefs for both of those two things. 

Muaz

From an art director’s point of view, how does that relationship actually work when you’re working with a photographer? I guess you were talking about sports. So coming to like a sports brand. So there’s probably an apparel related product. So they probably have a vision with regards to how that should appear.

So you get like stylists involved when you’re building up an advertising campaign. What happens when you approach a brief, when it comes to the mechanics and the relationships that come together to pull this through?

Sophie

That is a good question. There is a lot of mechanics that sort of form a line of process, I guess, especially from like an advertising point of view.

So usually when we get the brief in, you will need to have an idea for the shoot. And that usually comes from the creative director, but the art director, usually like to feed into this. I work quite well as like your creative team with a creative department at the moment, and in coming up with these ideas. I guess once that idea is set, then you’re going to need to sort of storyboard each shot.

And you’ll have that planned out about like, you know, what the sort of set is going to look like. On bigger budgets, you know, you’ll get a set designer. On smaller budgets, the art director will do it. And I think you also need to think about like the sort of angle of these shots. Which lens the photographer’s going to be using, where they’re going to stand, like what equipment they’re going to need as well before you even get the photographer. After you’ve kind of got all of that and got that signed off by the client, then that’s where you look for the photographer or the director.

Because you’ve chosen a sort of style. So you’ve got this kind of like look established and you’ll go through a list. You know, we usually have tons and tons of books of photographers and directors at advertising agencies and you’ll choose the right one that you think will get the right look. And then you ask those usually have about five, you know, your shortlist it. Ask them to do a creative treatment based on what you’ve done and they will pitch back and then you’ll choose the one that you liked the most, you sell that and their work into the client.

And then you can start planning the shoot. Yeah. In terms of a stylist, working with a sports brand, I tend to not have used them before, but again, it depends on, on what it is. If we’re shooting an athlete or a celebrity or something like that. It usually pays to get a stylist in because the athlete would like to choose their own stuff or work with a stylist to come up with a look.

However, if it’s more campaign based where they’re trying to sell a product, then it would not usually not really need a stylist. It can be done with the art director and the client making sure that you, whatever are the hero looks get featured in the hero shots and that they’re spread out as well and match up to your media plan.

So you’ll have pretty in advance, a media plan of where the shots are going to go, and then you’ll need to work out the timing as well. Because for example, some clothes, you know, don’t get delivered on time or they get delivered throughout a season. Um, so you’ll need to work out what shots we’ll get, you know, put out and meet the deadlines for the in-store delivery at the same time as well.

There’s a lot of like chicken and egg scenarios to play, especially with working with brands that have a big global production line as well. And then like, especially working on social as well. So you have organic media, paid media, partner channels, and you need to work out that those shots get differentiated per market as well.

So there’s a lot of like pre-thinking involved. And on this, on the day of the set, when it gets around to that, the art director, like I’d usually work really closely with the photographer. I don’t want to sound like I’m a hovering art director because that is quite cliche, but it is important. You do have to kind of be there and just make sure that what the content they’re getting is right, is aligned.

So you’ll be checking that off your shot list and your storyboards. You’ll be making sure the outfits correct. The sets correct. The shots correct. And usually there’s a few, like, you know, spanners in the works, like stuff won’t get delivered on time or you’ll work out that you’ve got two left shoes and you’ll need to work around that.

It’s up to yeah, the creative director and the art director to kind of solve those issues on set. Sometimes the client will be there as well, like on the shoot and it’s good and bad as you know, like it’s obviously quite stressful having the client there, but it’s really important. I think, because if things go the other way and you know, you need to rush a shoot through or, or change something, it’s really good to get their approval and sign off there.

So the last thing you want is two weeks after the shoot, the clients turn around, what is that? I don’t want that. I don’t like that. Where did that come from? That wasn’t on the storyboard. That wasn’t what I signed off. So it was really important if the client’s there to it’s, it’s your job as the art director and a creative director to kind of go up to the client, make sure the client’s okay with what’s, you know, show them, show them what you’re getting and show them the best shots and talk them through and talk them through the last minute changes and get those approvals.

Muaz

Perfect. When it comes to the various different types of projects that an art director would work with, some would be driven. So if there’s a client, for example, a sportswear brand, so they’ve got a specific product that they want to highlight as part of a project. And then you might be in another situation where rather than having a client, which is a brand… you might just have, for example, a network or you might have enough, for example, magazine that wants more a story that they want to portray as part of a project.

What would be the differences in approach between one and the other? 

Sophie

That is a great question. I think. Yeah. So just to clarify on editorial versus commercial, I think when you’re talking advertising to commercial would be more like sort of product driven and editorial would be more story driven. It wouldn’t necessarily be an editorial in a magazine per se, because I think, even over the last sort of five years, we’ve got more mediums than that. 

You know, we’ve got web and social, um, podcasts, you know, clubhouse and all of that as well. Those can all be like editorial driven content. So just to kind of like clarify those and at the start of, you know, like advertising in the sort of sixties, seventies, there was a definite like difference between the two.

But over the last few years, especially with these more mediums, there’s definitely more of a blend. I think that’s what I’m seeing anyway, like a lot of trends, but I think that’s due to the consumer being more aware, they’re more socially aware, culturally aware and savvy as well. Like people aren’t afraid to call brands out.

People have less of an attention span as well, and generally less of an engagement. So unless you’re working on some like big brand like Gucci or Nike, or, you know, you can’t just post a picture of a handbag now and expect it to perform. There has to be some deeper thinking into that. Audiences are demanding more.

And especially from brands, there’s a humanized element to it as well. They don’t want to just be fed another advert. It’s not, it’s not clever. They’re looking for something more and they’re looking for some like things that they can connect to. They want to be, you know, felt seen. They’re not just another archetypal man that wants to be sold a suit.

You know, they’re looking for the connection. And I think brands are realizing this, that commercial products don’t also just have to be product based. They can in fact, be like story driven or feeling driven as well. Like I know a good example of that is the Nike Londoners campaign. So that was like a huge commercial project right. But it didn’t sell anything. Like sure, there were Nike products within the campaign and within the advertisement, but it wasn’t focused on that. It was focused about feeling. It was all about like how, like these kids in London watching this, they’re going to feel seen, they’re going to like, they’re resonating that they, from that borough and like, oh, look, my borough is recognized.

And like, that is cool. Like, it was all about impact and left people feeling connected. So I think that is what more brands are kind of trying to set and get involved in. And that trickles down, you know, to the smaller brands as well. So I’m seeing it quite a lot. 

I think commercial projects, like they’re more sort of short-lived now I would say they’re like, it has an end game, you know, you’re selling your product through a season and then it’s gone.

But like visually you need to think about how to portray that as well. And it’s still going to be that. So it’s still going to be there on their feed and it still needs to connect. It can’t just be another picture of a handbag. 

Muaz

You know, it’s interesting, you say Nike. If they’ve been really good at this. And I think that they were very early at doing this and they’ve kind of driven the industry in this direction and about it being more, you know, like even like right at the beginning, you know, “Just Do It”, you know, just, just the whole persona that they created about the kind of individual who just wants to get things done.

I keep in the early Jordan ads, you know, they were, they were quite emotional. You know, this is like twenty-five years ago. So they were quite early at this game and it seems that things have just accelerated over the last five to six years. But it’s great that you mentioned Nike and I completely agree with that.

Sophie

You’re right there. They definitely have led the trend on that. And you can see, especially like brands getting more localized with their content as well. And I think the Londoners campaign again, like, sorry to keep harping back on to that, but that was one of the earliest biggest ads that I can personally remember that really featured and dived into this localised content and making people feel seen from a smaller level. You can see now, like bigger brands are starting to do that and being clever on social about like localizing content and where you’re from and picking up on that, which is definitely what the consumer is asking for, right. 

They want tailored adverts, they want content that’s meant to them. They don’t want to just see stuff that everybody else sees, they want to feel a bit more special.

You can find Sophie online at:

• Website: sophie-allen.co.uk
• Instagram: @sophieallen.jpeg

You can listen to the whole interview podcast over on our podcast page or by clicking here at The Art of Art Direction.