By Nina Beyers

Art Directors Anonymous 

It’s an Addiction. There are twenty one addicts at SCA. They are easy to identify. They start by muttering to themselves. They assume a wide eyed glazed stare and dribble slides out the corner of an ink stained mouth. A twitch pulses in their left eye. 

Saturday nights are spent alone with the light of a Macbook Pro lighting up their sallow face, a shade of yellowing parchment. 

You usually find addicts hunched over a Helmet Krone book or nose to nose with Pinterest. They often flock around Pixel Guru Ian on Friday afternoons. Or congregate around an exceptionally nifty use of After Effects. 

They tend to get their weekly hits from suppliers Toufic or Rob, providing LSD (Layout Sizing Delights) or MDMA (Mindblowing Decently Mockedup Animation).

They huddle around murmuring suspiciously, ’can you score me some printer credit?’ or ‘sort me out a hit of a red Sharpie’. 

But then, on one Thursday afternoon, the Art directors emerged from the Mac Den blinking at the bright sunshine.

We sat in a circle (not vectorised), united by the same obsession- Art Direction. It felt good to find others who were battling with the same addiction. We twiddled our discoloured thumbs and sheepily shared our template battles and logo woes. 

As one of us shared a particularly gruesome conflict with the grid we all shook our heads somberly. We laughed and praised each other on well traced SCAMPS and nodded vigorously at impeccable kerning. We clapped after each confession and the Art Director in question grinned amongst others with the same visual predisposition. 

Welcome to Art Directors Anonymous. See you next week.