By Gauthier Peyret

In a world where trades are evolving at such a speed that it is becoming difficult to keep up, the artistic director’s job is not exempt from it, I had the opportunity to see her during my various internships where I was asked to do web design and work on UI and UX. Here is my reflection on two professions that will probably end up forming one. But is that a good thing?

Start with the basics
Historically, the Artistic Director has worked for a long time on the message, storytelling, and ultimately, emotional. A beautiful visual, simple, simple, often uncluttered, to praise the merits of a product, to express the values of a brand, which we see on television, in movies, in magazine pages. In short, content that is appreciated through the media says 1.0, without interaction. The Experience Designer is a specialist of this interaction: he takes into account in his design work the rational aspect of the user, the one that allows him to locate himself in space, navigate from page to page, to decide, to make an action. The storytelling then becomes story playing. The real challenge is that the use meets both very precise and very subtle rules, and it is impossible to impose it on a user, even with a successful aesthetic approach: if he does not understand, he does not use. And if he doesn’t use it, the interaction is not between him and the brand. Another very important point is that most of the profiles of the Artistic Director type are, as its name suggests, artists. That is to say, they express themselves through their projects, putting a whole set of things, inspiration, elements of the air of the times and… many of them. They are therefore often in love with their projects and will defend their creations in front of the critics, in order to establish their positions as artists, to keep their work intact.

In another style, the Experience Designer is rather the catalyst of an idea, whose different pillars are user needs, on the one hand, brand constraints (business, image) and technical constraints on the other. He will, therefore, seek the right balance between these different elements to arrive at a Useful, Simple and Efficient solution, in order to meet a precise need. And if we criticize his work, he will consider it as a way to improve the current version of the project, in order to move on to the next iteration.

What do you think?