Hi everyone,

Fall is in full swing, and as always, it got me reflecting a lot. I love writing down a stream of thoughts in my journal, and something I’ve always struggled with is the idea of ‘hating’ my own work, to say it boldly. Part of that comes from analysing and writing about art direction all the time on my Substack, so I am constantly exposed to best-in-class work and give it a lot of attention. Other days I want to shut myself off from the world and not look at people’s work anymore, because it makes me so insecure. It’s an endless struggle every creative probably deals with.

You probably know the feeling of coming across an image and immediately knowing why it’s extraordinary. You recognise that the light falls perfectly, the composition, maybe the casting and all the small decisions that make it feel different from every other image. Quite often, you might probably also know exactly what doesn’t quite work about an image, but when you sit down to actually make something yourself, the distance between what you can recognisable and what you can actually create can feel enormous.

It’s a strange thing, because having good taste is supposed to make us better creatives. We spend years developing our eye, learning about photographers, watching films, collecting references and understanding what makes certain work interesting. Yet sometimes the more knowledgeable we become, the more dissatisfied we feel with what we’re capable of producing.

I experience this myself all the time, and it made me wonder whether there’s something larger happening in creative culture. We have more access to extraordinary work than any generation before us, and we’re becoming increasingly sophisticated at recognising and curating it. But access to the result doesn’t necessarily give us the experience of making it.

I think we’ve become very good at developing our taste, while sometimes forgetting that creative ability needs an entirely different kind of attention. And although creative work is always a collaboration, understanding how to communicate your thoughts and opinions to other team members is a really big part of this as well, but that is another deeper topic we could talk about some other time.

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Having a Good Eye Isn’t The Biggest Achievement

There’s something remarkable about how much creative knowledge we can accumulate today, often without noticing. We can study decades of fashion photography in an afternoon, discover an obscure Japanese publication through the Instagram algorithm, watch interviews with extraordinary filmmakers and explore museum collections from almost anywhere in the world. I love that this access exists, and I think it has opened up creative culture to people who might never have encountered these references otherwise.

But it has also changed our relationship with creative work. We can become incredibly familiar with the finished results of other people’s experience, while remaining quite distant from the process that produced them. This also counts for the journey of those who we admire, often their earliest work and ‘failed experiments’ aren’t preserved and we celebrate everyone’s best work.

Think about how we encounter an extraordinary image. We might recognise the photographer, know the year it was taken, understand its historical influences and have a clear opinion about what makes it successful. But we rarely see the hundreds of decisions that happened before this final image existed. The casting that didn’t work and wasn’t selected, the lighting tests, the conversations between the photographer and stylist, the changes made because something unexpected happened on set.

We see the result of someone’s creative judgement without experiencing the conditions under which that judgement was developed.

And I think this has created an interesting imbalance. In an industry where taste has become such an important part of professional identity, it’s possible to become very good at demonstrating what we like before we’ve developed the ability to make work that reflects those preferences. We have become curators of our own aesthetic world that exists within our mind. A beautifully curated Instagram page can communicate a sophisticated life with explicit taste. A reference deck can demonstrate knowledge of photography, cinema and design. A portfolio can be presented so convincingly that the creative identity surrounding the work feels almost as developed as the work itself.

These are valuable skills, particularly in art direction, where research and visual judgement are fundamental. But recognising an interesting image and understanding how to create one involve different kinds of knowledge.

The American radio producer Ira Glass described this tension through what has become known as the taste gap. People often enter creative fields because they have a strong appreciation for good work, but their early attempts don’t yet meet the standards that attracted them to the discipline. The gap is frustrating, because they can recognise what is missing.

I think this observation is especially interesting today because that distance can continue long after the beginning of a creative career. Our taste doesn’t stop developing when we become professionals. It continues changing through everything we encounter, often faster than we have opportunities to experiment and develop our own work. Which is another tension, we often know we are so much more capable than the actual work we are attracting and doing, because our taste is more developed than the execution skills. So, then you decide to do a personal or editorial project, the cycle is then that you invite collaborators that are slightly better than you and fit your enhanced vision, they look at your portfolio and don’t ‘fully trust’ you, so you hold back leading the project and feel shy about making decisions.

A thing I keep trying to tell myself is that my portfolio and the work I have done does not define me as a creative. It’s the way I carry myself and articulate decisions throughout the process.

The Difference Between Recognising and Understanding

There is a psychological concept called design fixation that I think introduces another interesting layer to this conversation.

In 1991, researchers David Jansson and Steven Smith investigated how examples influence the way people approach design problems. They found that exposure to existing solutions could lead participants to reproduce features of those examples, including features that weren’t particularly useful. The examples helped establish a direction, but they could also limit the alternatives participants considered.

Their experiments were concerned with design tasks rather than different art forms, so the findings don’t automatically explain how every creative works, but they do reveal something important: looking at an existing solution can influence the possibilities we’re able to imagine, sometimes without us realising it.

I think this is super relevant to a culture built around visual references. We spend so much time looking at finished work that we can begin to imagine our own ideas through the solutions other people have already created. A reference can show us what is possible, but it can also become the standard against which every new attempt is measured. And sometimes, instead of investigating what our own idea might become, we begin trying to achieve the quality of an image whose creative process we never experienced.

Knowing why an image works differs from knowing how to create one, but recognising these qualities doesn’t show you how to direct a subject, shape the light and composition, or create conditions for the unexpected. This is where I think we sometimes confuse visual literacy with practical creative ability.

Visual literacy helps us recognise and interpret images. It allows us to identify relationships, understand references and develop opinions about what we’re looking at. But making work introduces another set of questions. What happens when the model doesn’t move the way you imagined? When the location changes? When the photographer interprets the reference differently? When the image looks technically beautiful but communicates something entirely different from the original concept?

Those questions require a kind of knowledge that only develops through making.

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What Happens When Your Portfolio No longer Represents You?

Writing ART DIRECTION has been one of the most valuable things I’ve done for my creative development. It gives me a reason to keep researching, questioning and exploring subjects that interest me. I’ve learned an enormous amount about photography, cinema, publishing, visual culture and the history behind images I might otherwise have simply admired.

But recently, I noticed something uncomfortable. My ability to recognise and articulate the work I admired was developing much faster than my satisfaction with the work I had actually made. I became increasingly critical of my portfolio. Projects I had previously been proud of suddenly felt disconnected from the kind of art director I wanted to become.

Eventually, I decided to reset and remove nearly everything I had done. I wanted to create some space between the work I had made and the direction I wanted to move towards. And while I’m still rebuilding that body of work, the experience made me realise that my dissatisfaction wasn’t necessarily coming from a lack of progress, I was and am still landing jobs all the time.

I think this is an important distinction, because being critical of your own work can mean different things. Sometimes we’re comparing ourselves unfairly with the most extraordinary work in the world. But sometimes we’ve genuinely developed a more sophisticated understanding of what we’re trying to achieve. And I think holding on to work you’ve done years ago or simply because the client’s name is big, but it isn’t aligned with your actual taste can actually do more harm than good in today’s age. There is an overload of creatives, and your taste and thinking is what gets you hired.

The interesting thing is.. We are increasingly encouraged to establish a recognisable creative identity early in our careers. We need a portfolio, a personal website, a point of view, a carefully presented body of work and perhaps a social presence that communicates what makes us different.

In some ways, this is useful. Being able to articulate what interests you can help attract more aligned opportunities. But it can also create a strange situation where the presentation of our creative identity develops faster than the experience behind it.

We can become very good at showing people the kind of creative we want to be, while still learning how to become that person through the work. And with generative tools making sophisticated-looking imagery increasingly accessible, the difference between producing a convincing result and understanding the decisions behind it becomes even more important.

And I think this is where the value of practical experience becomes especially clear. The more easily we can produce the appearance of creative expertise, the more important it becomes to understand what expertise actually consists of.

Closing the distance

I don’t think we should stop researching or spend less time developing our taste. Strong creative practices thrive on an ongoing exchange between looking, thinking and making. Research reveals possibilities we hadn’t imagined; making tests them, uncovers unexpected problems and builds the judgement to respond. A project may show us what to study more closely, while a reference may only become clear through experimentation.

But I do think it’s worth becoming more conscious of the balance between the two.

If you have a very clear idea of the work you want to make, but your portfolio doesn’t yet reflect it, maybe stop collecting references for now. Choose one specific thing you want to become better at and developing a project that forces you to practise it.

The project doesn’t need to be expensive, public or particularly ambitious. It needs to give you an opportunity to make decisions you haven’t yet learned how to make. And afterwards, look at what happened. Which parts worked? Which decisions would you change? What did the process teach you that wasn’t visible in the original references?

The important thing is to recognise that knowing what good work looks like is only the beginning. At some point, we have to take that knowledge into the world, work with other people, make decisions, take risks and create things that might fall short of what we imagined. Because the work we make today doesn’t have to represent the full extent of what we’re capable of becoming.

Your taste can show you what’s possible. Your ability develops when you begin making it possible yourself.

I’d love to know whether you’ve experienced this gap between the work you admire and the work you make, and whether there was a particular project that changed how you understood your own abilities.

Leave a comment

Love,

Zoë

So I went back through all of it and sorted it into different pathways where you can find what suits you most depending on where you are at in your career.

These are 12 routes: Getting In, The Job, Looking, Thinking, Making, Doubt, Voice, Being Seen, The System, Worlds, Elsewhere and References. I’ll revisit it them once in a while to give the new weekly posts a place to live. All of these are a combination of paid and free, but the pathways are focused on the actual content.

*Some posts are 3 years old, I believe that my writing, writing style and expertise has significantly developed over the years when I started writing consistently. I will always be putting out new essays, even when I already covered the topic because the industry is always changing. <3

You can revisit all of these also on the homepage of my Substack.

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01. GETTING IN. Before anyone has hired you.

You want to get into art direction, but you aren’t entirely sure how. Start here to dip your toes into the profession.

02. THE JOB. What this actually is, day to day.

For the people who think art direction is one thing, but it’s one of the most diverse jobs you can imagine.

03. LOOKING. When everything you save looks like everything else.

Getting your research practice to another level, because it’s the base of your ideas.

04. THINKING. From a pile of references to an actual idea.

The gap everybody gets stuck in. You can find good images and still have nothing to say.

05. MAKING. Getting the idea past the people who have to approve it.

Nobody buys a concept because it is good, they need to understand the idea itself first.

06. DOUBT. When you can’t tell if you are any good.

I have written about this more than anything else, which probably tells you something.

07. VOICE. Working out what is actually yours.

Nobody can tell you this one, but maybe you can narrow it down faster than I did.

08. BEING SEEN. The work that gets you the next job.

Your portfolio is a proposal for what you want to do next.

09. THE SYSTEM. Why the industry works the way it does.

If you have ever wondered why the brief keeps getting worse, it is not you.

10. WORLDS. How a brand becomes a place you can recognise.

A deeper dive into some of the most recognisable brand worlds.

11. ELSEWHERE. Reading other disciplines as image sources.

Everything that made my work different came from outside image-making.

12. THE REFERENCE SHELF

I hope this gives you a useful insight into everything I’ve written in the last couple of years on Substack and a clearer overview to navigate the archive. If you have any topics you would love me to cover, feel free to leave a request in the chat. Xx

Have a lovely weekend,

Zoe x

Explore the Art Direction Archive Guide

There is a frustrating point in a creative career where you can see exactly the work you want to make, but your portfolio gives people very little reason to commission it. You need the work to get the work, and when so many capable people are trying to enter the industry, applying for more jobs can start to feel like repeating the same conversation with just being ghosted over and over again. I’m not going to sugarcoat, it is extremely hard to be a creative today. In the ART DIRECTION chat on Substack I’ve noticed people wanting to give up and not exactly sure how to continue.

While I can give you a motivational speed about how many rejections it takes to hear the one yes that will fundamentally level you up (and nobody will know about the rejections), how everyone is going through the same thing and that it really is a matter of believing in yourself and taking the action. I felt like we all have that knowledge in the back of our heads. So I wanted to start a series with all the ways I could think off that feels non-straight forward to get work as an art director, because work comes in many ways. I have tried many of them myself to eventuelly get to where I am. I’m not someone who grew up with a lot of money, or in a major fashion capital, or with parents who worked creative jobs, or anything related at all. I had to do it all by myself and right after college and even during quite literally survive and take on everything I possibly could to gain work experience and be taken seriously.

I think it helps to look more closely at what might give someone a reason to bring you in. Perhaps you understand something about their work that other applicants have overlooked. Maybe you can take one useful part of a project off their hands. Or you already work somewhere that could give you more creative responsibility, if you could help them see where it belongs.

Over the next months, I’ll be sharing different ways to get work as an art director, from making your first collaborations happen to building a practice that people return to. We’ll begin with six ways of getting closer to the work itself. Some involve applying, but the interesting part is what you give people to respond to.

This series is exclusively for paid subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to get not only access to this series, but also a great selection of subscriber perks and the entire archive of over 3 years of weekly posts.

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Explore the Art Direction Archive Guide

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Last weekend I was in Paris during fashion week and saw a huge team of builders at the Louvre. As curious as I am I had a peek inside and saw a very cool future city. I was so curious for the show, because seeing the set build on its own made me super excited.

There is something quite funny about looking at a flying c…

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You can spend an entire week feeding your creative practice and still give it very little that feels new, or personally excites you. You follow photographers, read interviews, save campaigns and visit an exhibition everyone is talking about. Each thing is interesting and relevant to the work you want to make. Yet almost eve…

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Giulia Canu is a London-based creative with a decade of experience across fashion, from editorial and styling to brand consultancy. She is the founder of The Inside Pocket, an exploration of fashion, shopping, style history and visual culture through a highly personal lens, including its signature moodboard series Visual Voyages.

Discover the Inside Pocket

When I was little, I use…

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A lot of what gets called trend forecasting now tells me more about who someone wants to be than where culture is going. When I first encountered forecasting while studying at AMFI, through a presentation from WGSN, I was honestly mesmerised. I hadn’t realised this was an actual job: researching changes in society and consider…

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There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with running a small brand in today’s age. You can see what it could become in your mind, you know the feeling you want people to have when they discover it. Then you open your laptop and there are twelve different things that need to be made.

The …

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When I read Pieter Mulier’s advice in the latest Self Service magazine, it got me thinking about how much we expect ourselves to know at the beginning. Mulier, the Belgian designer who previously led Alaïa and is now chief creative officer of Versace, spoke about the pressure to “speak immediately” and position yourself. I recognised that feeling. You want to enter the industry with something to say, and somehow that becomes the expectation that you should already know exactly who you are.

I wanted my first foot in the door to be perfect. The right projects, the right people, work that reflected the creative I hoped to become. Taking jobs because I needed money could feel defeating, and making work that felt far from my future self stressed me out. I was gaining professional experience, yet judging it by how convincingly it represented a person I hadn’t become. Every project had to prove I was heading towards her.

What interests me now is how easily a vision for your future can become a standard that makes your present feel inadequate. We are often way ahead of ourselves in our mind than our actual work caught up to. Ambition gives you somewhere to go, but when you expect every early experience to resemble the destination, you leave very little room for learning. Some of the work that helps you become a stronger creative will sit outside your portfolio. It can still belong in your development.

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There is something slightly contradictory about wanting to look like a woman who seems completely uninterested in what anyone thinks of her. You recognise her. She has her own taste, a life beyond the photograph, somewhere else to be. She looks comfortable being seen, without appearing to need it. And somehow, through a collection of c…

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Announcement Hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend. It’s the end of summer holidays and I’m feeling a renewed energy to bring many ideas to life. First of all, I’ve been working relentlessly on the comeback of Art Direction School. Starting with a completely new program called ‘The Recognisable Brand Method’ a.k.a. art direction for small businnes/ start-ups and sub-brands. It’s the first one where I am bringing my new teaching method to life with a detailed workbook where the exercises stack on each other and so much more. I am also currently announcing (but a more detailed one) the end of the Strategic Art Direction Program, you can still join now until November. Then the program will be relaunching as the Self-Made Art Director and it’s build entirely from scratch in a completely different format and way. People who join the Strategic Art Direction Program will automatically get access (and for free) to the Self-Made Art Director likely around November.

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Back with another Reference Wall, and this time it is a single campaign video, so different from the previous one which was focused on the house Chloe. The moment I saw the video, I felt like I wanted to take the references apart.

Gucci dropped Primavera this week, the latest from the house under artistic director Demna Gvasalia. It comes in 2 parts: A short film by director Johan Renck, with model Kate Moss lip-syncing singer Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” in a room of strangers who slowly pair off and fall in love on a dance floor, and a set of Renaissance-style portraits by photographer Michal Chelbin. Within a day everyone mentioned the same word for it: Nostalgic. The comments filled up with the nineties, Kate Moss, that whole era.

And this is exactly the bit I want to talk about, because Primavera is such a clean example of a technique I use on everything. I always look past what an image looks like. What it looks like is the child, the easy lookalike everyone clocks first. The thing I am actually after is the parent, the older thing that child came from, because the parent is where the real idea lives. And then I keep going, past the parent to the parent of the parent. Find the parent, not the child, and keep going to the third layer. I went deeper into this in my visual research post, as well as the ART DIRECTION chat. Do that here and a campaign everyone filed as a 90’s throwback turns into something much older and much better.

Primavera has two of these chains running through it. Here is the wall as I read it.

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For a long time I called myself exclusively an art director, and the word came with a rule I never questioned. An art director directs and comes up with ideas, but the actual craft should be left for the experts. Someone else holds the camera, someone else styles, someone else makes the thing. So when I couldn’t find the right collaborator for a personal project who felt right with the vision in my mind, I decided that I could do things myself such as; picking up the camera myself, or doing the styling myself, but it felt almost embarrassing, like I had wandered out of my lane. Like I wasn’t capable enough to gain the confidence of reaching out to the right people or even find them. It took me a while to learn the opposite is often true. When you are holding the whole vision, doing it yourself can exactly the point.

Writing happened to me in a similar way. I started putting down how I think about images, here, and it grew into its own practice, a following I never expected to get for someone who never thought of herself as a writer, then actually started to work for brands and magazines. I had become a writer without ever deciding to be one, but followed the creative urge to write and became one. And underneath all of it sits a simple fact: I love making in almost every form. Drawing, sewing, stories, film, styling, graphic design. I want to make all of it! Even medium’s I haven’t even thought of. Somewhere in there I noticed something. An idea that felt flat as an image could come alive the moment I let it be something else.

That gap between a good idea and flat work is the thing I want to talk about in today’s post. We usually see this as a talent problem, or something not being ‘creative enough’. Most of the time it is a fit problem, but this is bigger than rescuing one stubborn idea. Sometimes the pull into a new form is a very strong gut feeling. It can show up as feeling bored, or something you can’t name keeps nudging you toward a medium you have never touched. That instinct needs to be trusted more than we do. A new form breaks your habits and wakes the work back up, and the process gets exciting again in a way that staying put never manages.

There is also a hidden advantage in arriving late to a medium. You come in without its rules and its tired moves, and what you carry from everywhere else can be fresher than what a seasoned specialist brings, because they have made the same thing a hundred times and you are seeing it new. Every person in this piece was an outsider to the form that made them.

We even ask the wrong question about it. Am I a photographer, a writer, a director. That question keeps you locked in one lane, every creative is a creator but became specialised in a certain medium. Here is a better question to ask: which form does this idea actually want? The same idea can look thin as a photograph and sing as a sentence, and the difference is never how good you are.

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Hi everyone,

Today I wanted to share a bit of a motivational post that I felt inspired to write after reading the book ‘the Magic of Thinking Big’ by David Schwartz. I definitely recommend this book for anyone who is looking to expand their mind; it’s one of the best books I’ve read. What I found particularly interesting was t…

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Perfume is likely the hardest product to market, because it’s the one produce an image truly cannot see. You can’t photograph a smell, you can’t put the essence of the product in a carousel, billboard or 30-second hero film. And yet, fragrance is one of the biggest and most image-led business in all of fashion. It’s sold a…

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I was listening to an interview with the set designer Shona Heath on the podcast ‘What’s Contemporary Now’ (really recommend this!), who has built some of the strangest and most beautiful worlds in fashion, first across twenty years alongside Tim Walker and more somewhat recently as one of the two designers behind the film Poor Thing…

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I read a lot, sometimes not the entire book. When it bores me I abandon it and start a new one, but there are certain books that really expanded my ways of thinking. For example, Ways of Seeing, On Photography and The Creative Act are those books just like for everyone but I deliberately didn’t include them in this list since everyone already knows. All three are brilliant. They are also the three titles anyone who has spent five minutes near art direction has already been recommended.

So here are 15 books I recommend if you are ready to expand your thinking. Some are about images directly. Most have nothing to do with images at all, and those tend to be the ones that changed the way I work the most.

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Welcome to a new series I have been wanting to make for ages. It is called The Reference Wall, and the idea is simple. I pick a brand, or a designer, sometimes a filmmaker or a choreographer, and I go and find out where they actually pull from. Maybe I could even invite creatives to do their own version of this or share mine. Where the collect…

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