5 top tricks and tips: when Art Direction goes digital

Art Direction for Digital Campaigns is a broad scope to cover. Alex Lampe looks at a holistic approach to creating integrated digital campaigns. To whet your appetite, he’s shared a few inside tips, with examples spanning user experience, activation, messaging, digital design and animation. These D&AD winners, old and new, set a benchmark for digital art direction.

This project is still a benchmark for an integrated, digital-first product. It brings together innovation, product design, user experience, campaign and digital craft to create an experience that delivers the central brand mantra of ‘Just do it’ (while spurring the trend for self quant). The FuelBand created a social currency for the wearer, through an online community of friends to help motivate and form workout habits. The App and digital design of the product looked beautiful, with encouraging animations and trophies to help keep you motivated through using it.

Credits: Nike+ FuelBand
Awards: Yellow Pencil, Digital Design 2013
Agency: R/GA

This campaign for the Australian safety commission worked with medical practitioners, scientists and artists to create an evolved human form that would be able to withstand car accidents in today’s age. The resulting grotesque form was created as a life-size sculpture, which can be explored digitally, allowing users to understand just how vulnerable humans are. Graham quickly became a social media phenomenon and was one of the top-trending stories on Twitter and Facebook over his first weekend, attracting over 10.4 million page views on the website.

Credits: Meet Graham
Awards: Yellow Pencil, Integrated 2017
Agency: Clemenger BBDO Melbourne​

Brands and agencies are tripping over themselves to create killer VR experience. One of the things that holds VR back is the need for a headset, which isolates the wearer.  Field Trip to Mars is a VR experience designed to transport groups of school children to another planet. Installed within a school-bus, the windows reveal a view across a martian landscape that responds to the bus’s movements. The experience is built using the Unity Games Engine and combines physical hardware, sound design and CGI to create an emotional experience for the kids.

Credits: Field Trip To Mars
Awards: Yellow Pencil, Digital Design 2017
Agency: McCann New York

Digital Design is much more than just visual, as is perfectly demonstrated in the Dot Watch: A micro-braille smart watch designed for the visually impaired. The Dot Watch highlights the capacity and responsibility for digital design to be inclusive and also the advent of the zero-ui, where voice, sensors and ai are the primary way to interact with a device.

Credits: DOT. The First Braille Smartwatch
Awards: Black Pencil, Digital Design 2017
Agency: Serviceplan

There are so many websites to choose from that demonstrate great digital art direction, but this simple website for the London Symphony Orchestra has all the components: simplicity, fluid user interface, choreography and entertainment.

Credits: London Symphony Orchestra LSO Play
Awards: Wood Pencil, Integrated 2014
Agency: Sennep​

These examples serve to demonstrate that great Digital Art Direction is more than what you see on the surface. Yes nice, visual animation, great looking interfaces and digital tactility matter, but deeper routed are transformational ideas that use technology to create new opportunities, connect new audiences, enhance lives and communicate powerful messages using the velocity of social media.