How to Level up Your Art Direction

Art Direction and Brand Experience

Art direction is more than making imagery look attractive. It starts with deciding what a viewer should feel, then making intentional visual and creative choices to create that response. Strong brands carry their concepts through campaigns and into the wider customer experience, rather than art-directing only occasional shoots.

Examples and Creative Approaches

• Bandit Running builds a distinct concept and narrative for each collection or campaign. Past work includes a heatwave-inspired summer campaign, manipulated LED and film lighting, and a New York City subway set built in a studio.
• Bandit’s spring 2025 campaign, filmed in Red Hook, New York, uses gritty architecture and landscape to evoke the feeling of running alone beyond familiar neighborhoods.
• Outsiders Store makes straightforward product photography more expressive through deliberate choices: simple backdrops, deliberately messy styling, action-specific models, and layered colorways.
• Bandit’s Chicago Marathon capsule extended an architectural concept across products, a fictional architecture studio and editorial, a themed pop-up, interactive portraits, and take-home items. The goal was a cohesive, 360-degree brand experience.
• Creative references can be combined to generate a new direction—for example, pairing the work of Stanley Kubrick with Isamu Noguchi, then interpreting the combination through the brand’s own identity.

Planning and Production

• Mood boards are created about a year ahead, with one for each season. Bandit’s co-founder and chief design officer, Ardith, assembles images that inform the collection.
• A manifesto establishes the collection’s starting point; the campaign creative then translates and develops that vision.
• Product, campaign, pop-up, and experience teams work from a shared schedule, track milestones, and meet regularly to coordinate.
• Production may require improvisation. Tim described difficult shoots in Iceland and a planned St. Vincent shoot disrupted by a hurricane. The team adapted by shooting in Paris just before release.
• Post-production is part of the creative process: editing can reshape images and help a campaign reach its intended result.

Advice and Techniques

• Start with the question: What should the audience feel when they see this?
• Give each shoot or campaign a clear concept—not just a different color, background, or location.
• Carry the concept across the whole brand experience, including products, pop-ups, social content, websites, email, and customer interactions.
• When planning a social carousel, select roughly five to seven images. Vary composition, distance, and treatment—for example, wide and tight shots, or color alongside black-and-white images. Sequence them to keep viewers interested and make the final image as compelling as the first.
• Plan behind-the-scenes content and other uses for campaign assets before the shoot. Consider how the work can travel across platforms and through influencers.
• Revisit archival assets and adapt them to current formats to tell the brand’s history.
• Look for ways to scale successful ideas. A campaign’s visual language or set can inform influencer work, user-generated content, ads, and other communications.
• Treat art direction as a conceptual, cross-disciplinary role that can bring together photography, film, design, fashion, and other mediums. It also involves communicating the vision to the people executing it.
• Creators can use content-making to test and share ideas more directly. Jason also emphasizes practical discipline: schedule time for thinking, client follow-ups, and delivery work to stay on track.

Creators and Contributors

• Oren — co-host; also referred to as “Orin” in the subtitles.
• Clayton Chambers — co-host and co-publisher of the Hyper brand-strategy newsletter.
• Tim — Bandit Running team member who discusses the brand’s campaigns and process.
• Ardith — Bandit co-founder and chief design officer; creates the seasonal mood boards and collection vision.
• Jason Murray — former Amazon art director and independent creative.
• John — photographer on Bandit’s Olympic capsule shoot.
• Henry — producer on that shoot.