Art director Quotes

Creative people have to believe in the value of their work.

If you don’t have any belief then you can’t give anything—designing is an act of giving, and a belief in the value of the work fuels the desire to express something. It’s important to know what your values are and to take care of them.

You can be cautious or you can be creative, but there’s no such thing as a Cautious Creative.

To create great work, here's how you must spend your time: 1% Inspiration 9% Perspiration 90% Justification

Advertising is poison gas. It should bring tears to your eyes, unhinge your nervous system and knock you out.

Nothing comes from nothing. You must continuously feed the inner beast that sparks and inspires.

Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Creativity can solve almost any problem.

Things that make you weird as a kid will make you great tomorrow.

Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.

Most people work at keeping their job, rather than doing a good job.

If you're the former, you're leading a meaningless life. If you're the latter, keep up the good work.

The joy of the creative process, minute by minute, hour after hour, day by day, is the sublime path to true happiness.

A cautious creative is an oxymoron.

Creativity thrives on a consistent diet of challenges and opportunities, which are often one and the same.

Actions speak louder than meetings.

Inspiration is hogwash. My work comes directly out of my loves and hates. Muses don't whisper in my ear, and ideas don't flow over my body like a cool rain.

I am in the poison gas business. Advertising should make you choke, make your eyes water, make you feel sick.

Baby Steps are for Babies, Not Brands. Be Amazing or Be Surpassed.

Follow your bliss. That which you love you must spend your life doing, as passionately and as perfectly as your heart, mind and instincts allow.

I have a lot of difficulty in a business culture that is only interested in making money. I can't see the point. What's the point of spending £10,000 just to make £20,000? Why not just keep the £10,000?

If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.

The logo is an identifier but it's also something that stands-in for who you are.

Graphic designers should be literate in graphic design history.

Being able to design well is not always enough. Knowing the roots of design is necessary to avoid reinvention, no less inadvertent plagiarism.

Never, ever, work for bad people

Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you need to - restraint is something I admire. At the end of the day, it is still a battle between good vs. crap.

Onwards and upwards, and never give your failures a second thought.

I've never found a client's business problem that could be solved solely through advertising.

You can't learn anything new, until you are open enough to forget everything you think you know

I have always felt the word 'advertising' is either a diminutive or derogatory term that kind of goes with stuff people don't like, and I always felt frustrated because I felt like I was a communication artist or a media artist. The best advertising is one of the art forms of our culture.

The business world worships mediocrity.

Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it.

Creative people are 50% ego and 50% insecurity.

When creatively passionate people get together to start a company, the energy and camaraderie is really pretty stimulating.

Put your weird in your work!

An incredible advertising career is not about creating an incredibly amazing ad, it's about making an incredible amazing ad every single day of your career, it's about getting those adds killed, and resurrecting them over and over again. It's about your season average not that occasional home-run.

Hey! You can be more than just a car company.

You can be more than just a pet food company. You can aspire to loving dogs, rather than just feeding dogs.

What I've always loved to do is build a brand that's so cool that you want to wear their T-shirt.

A perfectionist is someone who finishes the backside of a drawer, which I consider completely unnecessary.

Managing brands is going to be more and more about trying to manage everything that your company does.

Telling stories on behalf of brands is what I've done all my life.

Never listen to music when you're trying go come up with a Big Idea.

Distraction is the most corrosive disease of the 20th century.

Ultimately, if you are doing great work, the money will come.

What I know how to do is nurture and help people discover the best opportunities.

We are born with magic inside of us

Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind.

But I love that feeling of utter depletion: It is an ecstatic sense of having committed myself to the absolute limit. But after recharging at night, I'm ready to go the next morning. Isn't that what life is all about?

It's about whittling. It's about taking something and whittling and whittling and getting it sharp and perfect. Then you've got something.

Advertising, an art, is constantly besieged and compromised by logicians and technocrats, the scientists of our profession who wildly miss the main point about everything we do.

In any creative industry, the fact that others are moving in a certain direction is always proof positive, at least to me, that a new direction is the only direction.

Working hard and doing doing great work is as imperative as breathing.

Creating great work warms the heart and enriches the soul. Those of us lucky enough to spend our days doing something we love, something we're good at, are rich. If you do not work passionately (even furiously) at being the best in the world at what you do, you fail your talent, your destiny, and your god.

The accurate measure of a human being is what he or she actually gets done.