This blog seems so deeply antagonistic towards illustrators. Reading through this has made me wary of ADs and wonder if they are all bitter, impatient people who feel like artists are some inconvenient but necessary annoyance to getting your bosses approval. Not people who got this job because they love art and are good at managing people with empathy and patience.
1.) I think maybe, Nonny, you might be reading a tone in the text that isn’t necessarily there?
2.) We need to talk about the word “approval”. The approval COMES from bosses. Approval isn’t a please-dad-say-you’re-proud-of-me, it’s an official “Yes, this may officially be [sent to print/ given to coders/ utilized in such a way that it moves the project it was commissioned for forward/ paid for].” The whole point is to make a piece that gets Approval, because that is when the job is done. It’s the AD’s job to find the artist that can accomplish this and then set them up for success, and then shepherd that approval as efficiently as possible.
Are we a little focused on getting approvals done? Well, yes. That’s the point, and that’s the point of EVERYTHING we convey to the artists we hire. The point of this blog is to give you information as directly as we can. An AD’s job is to MOVE THE PROJECT FORWARD. Good ADs nurture relationships with artists and work within the parameters of the project they are given to give as much flexibility and voice to the artist as possible, but at the end of the day, this is about the art, and not about YOU. It’s not school. Both the illustrator and the AD are professionals.
People who are easy to work with make for good relationships, and good relationships make for better art. Better art makes things go way more smoothly. If you want a fun, lasting relationship with your art director, be a professional, and do good work. Which goes for BOTH sides.
Your art director is not your Professor, or your Fun Aunt. They are, temporarily, your boss, and they’ll do their damnedest to manage you and the 5-60 other people on their current plate with empathy and patience while also doing you the courtesy of assuming that you are a pro.
P.S. Agent KillFee here too. I think you might be missing the humor in many of these posts. ADs have to love art and working with artists, or else we can’t do our jobs. However, the very point of this tumblr is to show, unvarnished, what an AD’s true reactions and thoughts are. Do ADs get frustrated with artists, the process, our own approvers, and the entire industry? Absolutely. The same amount that artists do. But whereas artists hear their side of the story constantly from other artists, only ADs hear each other’s stories. We wanted to change that because we think artists can learn a lot from hearing the AD’s thought processes. So no, we don’t sugarcoat things, and we do write our first, true responses down. But it’s also in a humorous, occasionally snarky voice, because we’re humorous, snarky people. Nothing any AD on this blog has ever written has been in a “deeply antagonistic” tone. But the truth stings sometimes, and we’re not going to pull our punches either.