Drawing takes practice. Great drawers draw things like the Mona Lisa and God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Art Directors, on the other hand, draw people like this:

And that’s okay.

Most Art Directors, myself included, used to know how to draw. Really — we knew how to draw people and animals and vases and fields of corn. Then we started directing art and such. That meant “drawing” headlines instead of heads, and layouts instead of landscapes. And that’s okay, too. Because these were just ideas, and clients knew their finished product would look nothing like my crazy sketches they waited three days to see. They knew it was only a concept and actually used their imaginations to fill in the details, knowing the finished piece would be much better. The idea was king, and the execution of it an exciting collaboration of creative and client vision.

As time went on, we began to acquire cheater tools — Letraset type, stat machines, the Lazy Lucy — all invented to make development of the creative product faster and more complete. (If you’re a young art director who doesn’t know what any of those things are, call up the person you probably replaced and ask them.) We even had a set of 256 Design markers (in case there was any confusion about what color red that Coke can should be, I guess). These tools allowed us to cut time off the concept development and show layouts that were basically camera ready. Life was beautiful and everything was right with the world because the client could get a better idea of the concept, but still know it was going to get better once it was complete. And a lame concept was still lame, but shiny.

Then computers came along. Suddenly clip art and stock photography were a click away, along with an infinite selection of fonts available at the touch of a button. The very idea of sketching out an idea became laughable. Why sketch it out when, in an hour, you can have it all but done? Nowadays we show clients raw ideas that look ready to go to publication, and they love them. But that’s the problem — they love them too much. If you happen to think of a way to improve your idea or, even worse, have a new idea, the client balks — they want the idea they saw the day before. And telling them the new idea is better does no good, because they fell in love with first idea. So now you have to come up with your best idea right off, because you leave yourself no wiggle room.

I say let’s go back to the drawing board. Let’s get out those old pencils, dust off those old erasers and go back to pulling ideas out of our brains instead of our hard drives. And no, I’m not saying don’t use all those resources we have — I’m just saying don’t use them until you have an idea you like, the client likes and the public will like. An idea that’s been allowed to percolate and fester and develop instead of being requested on Monday, executed on Tuesday, presented on Wednesday and sent to the publication on Thursday. The Mona Lisa and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel each took four years to complete.* Given that, spending an extra day or two on a cat food ad doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

*And no, Da Vinci wasn’t that much slower than Michelangelo, he just had a lot more going on in his life. You try inventing the helicopter with one hand and painting the Mona Lisa with the other and see how long it takes you.