A Creative’s Maths

By Mara Wissenbach

Although it is often said that you relearn many things when coming to university from your former education, surely basic arithmetics stay the same right? Yet one of the first things you learn in creative advertising is that one plus one equals three.

This is however not meant in the mathematical sense as one may assume. It is the basic structure of the creative advertising team in which one of the two is a copywriter, while the other takes the art director’s role. Only through the combination of these two parties can the third person be created. It is the magical equation through with the collaborative work of these two individuals produces the creative outcome by melding both of their skill sets together into one product.

Both the copy and visuals in an advertisement need to complement each other and must not remain separate entities by the time the product is finished. Equally, the copywriter and art director need to work together in order to perfect their piece.This may seem like a strict and stifling structure at first, but after several times of working together you and your partner will realise that there is no such thing as black and white here either. Your copywriter may reach over and tell you to ‘move that image a bit closer to the foreground’, while your art director might state that you should ‘shorten that phrase, because it reads better like this.’

Regardless of what the case might be, you should work together closely enough to determine each others’ skills and appreciate when the other has things to add to the area of expertise that you initially thought you would be taking on by yourself. Realistically it never goes quite like that, but that is never an issue either. All ideas are worth sharing and keeping. Who knows, maybe you’ll be using it at a time and place that you least expected!