Degrees of Art Direction

- Art Direction Level +

Francisco Inchauste’s article on Drawar crit­i­cizing the trend of art direc­tion really got me thinking. Sure art direc­tion can add to the expe­ri­ence of an article, but he’s right in thinking the trend it isn’t all good, and it def­i­nitely isn’t always needed. The key to art direc­tion is knowing which arti­cles can ben­efit from it and for which it will detract from the content.

Art direc­tion doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing treat­ment. Who’s to say there’s nothing between com­pletely art-directed con­tent and the default tem­plate? I think people get sucked into the idea that every post has to be dras­ti­cally dif­ferent to be a suc­cess. If there’s no reason to scrap your site’s struc­ture, don’t do it.

That’s how I’ve decided to handle styling arti­cles on my blog; I use as much art direc­tion as they demand. I like to think of it as sim­ilar to the con­cept for the Rotis type-family by Otl Aicher:

  • Templated. When your default tem­plate does the job, there’s no need to impress, just stick to the basics.
  • Semi-Templated. Sometimes there’s no need to recreate the wheel but you still need to add a little func­tion­ality or flare to an article.
  • Semi-Art-Directed. For when you need all the style of an art-directed article, but don’t want to iso­late the article from the rest of your site.
  • Art-Directed. The com­plete over­haul: scrap the entire struc­ture of your blog (except maybe your nav­i­ga­tion) and tailor every­thing to the article.

Of course these strict cat­e­gories don’t really exist; they’re just an inter­esting way to visu­alize the idea.

The way I achieve the art direc­tion on my blog is with two plu­gins: Designate by Benedict Eastaugh and Art Direction by Noël Jackson. Designate is an awe­some plugin that auto­mat­i­cally links a stylesheet with the article’s slug to the article if one exists. It would be great if it also linked javascript files, but since it doesn’t, I add spe­cific jQuery code to arti­cles through Art-Direction’s custom post field.

Take my word for it or try the system for your­self, but it’s very lib­er­ating. You aren’t ever boxed into a single style, yet you still have a solid tem­plate to fall back on when you need it. This allows me to use my blog as an exper­i­menting ground as well—something that I find very important.

What do you think? Should art-direction be imple­mented in varying amounts?