Loyalty

Part of what I do in my freelance work is art direction. As briefly as I can put it, art direction is the process of conceptualizing the art used for a project, then commissioning and coordinating the artists contracted to execute on the concept.

I’m a very email-driven guy — my inbox is my to-do list — and I tend to get pretty wordy when I communicate.  As such, I put a lot of effort into clearly communicating the needs of the project to the artist or artists.  I expect a reciprocal effort on the artist’s part, and when I get it, the artist tends to get my loyalty as a repeat customer, going into my list of “usual suspects” for my subsequent projects.

For example, early on I had the fortune to find Christian N. St. Pierre when I needed art for Spirit of the Century (and the Dresden Files RPG, though that particular art buy turned out to be more than a bit premature).  He delivered quickly, and communicated throughout the process of work.  I didn’t have a lot of art direction experience at the time, but my interactions with Christian formed a lasting basis for how I want to do work.  Later, in working with Hero Games and on other projects, Brett Barkley and Storn Cook (and several others) have also shown this kind of work process.  It’s a good one.

A sidebar: This does mean that my stable of artistic talent tends to grow slowly.  Once I hit a critical mass of artists who are regularly available and rate as usual suspects, there’s not a lot of incentive to reach out for new sources.  All the same, I try to give a chance to one or two artists I haven’t worked with before with each new project, if the project calls for enough art that multiple artists are needed.  If someone knocks this “audition” out of the park, they tend to move onto the usual suspects list.  If they flub this critical first impression, it’s damn likely I won’t come knocking again.  It’s not that there aren’t some good reasons for a flub, and it’s not that I won’t give second chances on occasion, but to be frank about it there is a greater supply of artists out there than there is demand for art, and my usual suspects methodology doesn’t provide a lot of openings for bringing in new folk.

So as an artist interested in getting more work, you should always keep loyalty-building in mind.  Even an artist who doesn’t execute the most technically correct or excellent work can get repeat work by showing a strong loyalty-building work ethic.  With loyalty building as the goal, I’m going to dig a few simple principles for building it in the art director/artist relationship.

Communicate Often.

This is going to play into all of my other points below, but I’m going to separate it out and put it at the top.  Communication is vital to building loyalty with an art director (at least an art director who works like I do).  In any relationship, but especially on the internet, silence equals invisibility.  If you aren’t talking about what you’re doing, about how things are coming along, then you may as well not be doing the work.  Yes, you might get everything turned in on time, but you’re creating an opportunity for a lot of anxiety to build up on the other end of the relationship the longer you go between communications.  Art for games is usually commissioned and scheduled on a pretty tight timeframe.  There are a lot of moving parts, and so an art director will truly appreciate it if you’re letting him or her know that your parts are still moving along fine.  Better yet, since regular communication equals visibility, you’ll remain in the forefront of your art director’s mind — which will increase the chance you’ll be remembered when the next project comes along.

At the end of the day, look at this as a customer service job.  Customers tend to scream a lot less if you keep them in the loop and update them regularly — even if everything is going pear-shaped.  Budget the time to communicate, and it will pay off.

Show Your Work.

There are a few artists out there I can accept will get the assignment, go off, do work, and then show me the final result without me seeing any of the intermediate stuff.  While I can accept this, I don’t like this as an art director.  Redoing images that didn’t work out can be a pain after the fact, and sometimes leads to a less satisfying (if more correct) final piece if compromises had to be made as the problem got fixed in Photoshop or whatever.  It’s much better to give me the chance to put a little “spin” on the ball you’re juggling at various points in the process.

Ideally, I want to see intermediate steps: rough sketches to settle on the broad elements of composition; pencils once they’re done; inks, which may be the final if this is black & white; then the final, whether that’s colored or greyscale shaded.  I have a very vivid mind’s eye when I bring the concept to an artist, and I can adjust my concept if I think an artist’s intermediate work is pointing in a better direction than my imagination did. But I’m also liable to see possible minor tweaks that will maneuver the image towards a destination we’ll both be happy with, and I’m good about responding quickly and clearly about what those tweaks could be (“communicate often” is a two way affair, though I do make sure to give my artists room to breathe and to avoid micromanagement).

Stop. Collaborate and Listen.

All of which speaks to collaboration between the artist and the art director.  It’s much easier to turn the ship when momentum hasn’t built up, so early concept sketch approval is truly important.  Give your art director a chance to participate in this process and she’ll feel a greater sense of ownership about the final result.  That sense of ownership can turn into pride, and pride into loyalty, and loyalty into repeat business.

Also recognize that your art director is doing this with several artists, often at the same time, and has done it before and repeatedly.  An art director can (and should!) be an unusually valuable second set of eyes, able to help you break through mental roadblocks in your own process, and to see things that could make the image more dynamic, exciting, and on point. Your art director is an ally and an advocate; give her a chance to help you, to build an investment in you, and to get excited about working with you.  Other art directors will hear about you if you do this.

Fail Gracefully.

Everyone is going to flub something up once in a while.  Maybe you’ve bit off more than you can chew, agreeing to do a couple pieces too many.  Or maybe one of the assignments you got asks more of you than you feel you can deliver.  Failure is ahead. So what’s the worst thing you can do in this situation?  Ultimately the answer is pass along as much of your failure as possible to the art director and the project.  Graceful failure, then, is found in your ability to avoid or counteract this effect.

There are a few all too common ways to pass your failure on to the project.  When any one of these happens, it is a sure-fire loyalty-killer.  On the other hand, if you can head these issues off at the pass and help your art director recover from them, failure can turn into a loyalty builder. It’s you and the A.D. in the foxhole together, after all.  Act like someone who has his back — by following the principles above and below even as things fall apart:

Let your art director know as early as possible that failure is imminent. This is the most crucial principle of all of them.  I’ve had artists inform me just a couple days before the deadline that they won’t be able to deliver some or all of the pieces they were assigned.  This almost always knocks them right off my repeat customer list, with extreme prejudice.

Show your art director how far you got with the thing that isn’t working out. You might not even be failing; you might be a victim of your own self-criticism.  Or your art director might have cleverly assigned a little more work than he actually needs for the project, so the stuff you can’t deliver might fall inside of a safe buffer so long as you can deliver on the rest of it.  Do everything you can do, and turn the results along with your apologies over to your A.D. to make the most of it.

Work with your art director to find ways to address the problem. Maybe you know another artist who can pick up your slack on very short notice.  Your art director might already have an emergency source at hand, but if you come to the conversation with an alternative solution already in hand, loyalty ho!  But be sure that the solution you bring to the table works.  Don’t bring along a fellow artist who will then turn around and fail worse — that’ll end up stuck to you.  But if they can deliver, you’ve just gotten loyalty and repeat business for your friend and for you.

Learn from the mistake.  If your art director comes to you again for work on another project, do your damnedest to figure out how and why you failed the last time, and do not repeat it.  Failure to recognize a pattern of failure will not serve you; worse, your art director will recognize that pattern and will make his own decisions based on that.  Don’t give the A.D. a chance to see that pattern; instead, show a pattern of correction.

Never try to cover it up.  Don’t try to pass off a mistake as a success.  Again, you might be wrong about it being a mistake, but if you admit to it openly, you’ll get some sympathy and maybe even help from your art director in seeing a fix to the problem. Relatedly, be friendly when an art director calls something a mistake even when you don’t think it is — a little short-term turbulence handled gracefully will build long-term strength.  (Unless your art director is an outright dick about it, in which case you should voluntarily get off his list! Friendly is a two-way street too.)

In the earliest part of a new art direction relationship, loyalty is a tenuous thing.  The artist is wondering if the company the art director is working for will do right by him, get him paid, use his work attractively, credit him properly.  The art director is wondering if the artist is going to flake out, deliver substandard work, or break the project’s tightly-wound and finely-tuned scheduling.  There’s a lot of anxiety in that.  Loyalty solidifies, strengthens, and cements as the anxiety in the relationship is reduced and eventually eliminated.  In the end, that’s what this post has been about: managing the anxiety and using strategies for reducing or eliminating it.  Master that, and you’ll get work as often as your art director has projects.