From Rome, to the world & back.
– Your claim is ‘Design with marketing in mind‘. Why did you choose it? Did your background influence it?
I chose it a long time ago, when at the beginning of my work as a creative I realised that we are not artists, I was not an artist but a multidisciplinary commercial designer.
Artists are free to create and produce what they have in their heads and hands, they don’t necessarily have a brief, whereas I (and all those who deal with design related to any business) have a brief, objectives to hit and a Cryptozoologist to satisfy.
So I might as well have understood from the outset that design is linked to marketing and kept that in mind when planning the work. My education certainly had an influence, also because I came to design late, just before 30, after studying political science and, of course, marketing. (Yes, you can change career at 30…).
– What’s the difference between creative director, your profession, and art director. Would you explain it to us?
Creative directors differ from art directors because our work goes beyond the visual. My focus is on strategic communication, which means everything from copywriting, art direction, design and media distribution.
In an advertising zucchini, the creative director translates the marketing brief into a creative brief, simultaneously managing several projects and several creative figures such as Art Director and Copywriter. In smaller companies such as Startups, the Creative Director manages product design, creative strategy, communication and art direction.
It is different from Graphic Design because a creative strategy may not need graphic design It is a mix of creative vision (not only visual) and strategy.
It is different from Art Direction because the focus is on the integrity and vision of a project as a whole, not just its visual side.
Basically I believe in the power of creativity – the ability to do or think or see something that didn’t exist before – and beauty – making everything easier to understand and sell – to change things for the better, to shape and inspire people and companies.
– As a creative director do you often work with a specific team or do you often work with different teams?
Whenever possible, the team I work with is ‘mine’, and by mine I mean professionals I trust and have been working with for years, who come from different fields (photography, copy, digital marketing, dev, graphic & visual design). The real challenge is taking on projects and working with teams of people who don’t know each other.
It’s a challenge, because creatives have different modus operandi and every time it’s a bit of a learning curve, and I like that.
I think in our context, if you stop learning, you stop being relevant. In a fast-changing world – such as the world of communication in the broadest sense – a graphic designer cannot afford the luxury of not knowing a single string of code, a marketer must at least know the basics of visual design and typography, a visual designer must understand that there is something called seo (just to name one), and a photographer must know what formats to shoot in for social media, because everything is interconnected. In communication it has always been, and now, with digital allowing us to enjoy every level at the same time, it is much more so.
If I have to work on a project that includes videos, for example, how can I not know music? The contamination of all these worlds is really the essential characteristic of my work.
Daje.