THE ART DIRECTOR SPEAKS

P. K. THOMAJAN sees through the eyes of art director Briggs that simplicity is the passport to success in commercial advertising and offers information for building up this technique which is much sought after

Part V
HANGING on a wall outside Stanford Briggs’s modernistic office, a boldlylettered framed sign reads: ’If you
aim to become a well-rounded advertising man study to know all you can about everything except Art; leave art and its appli
cation to those who have devoted long years necessary to become artists and art directors.’
Inside Mr. Briggs’s sanctum, a slender picture executed in Chinese fashion, proclaims:
‘ Most of us know so little it is folly to be modest about the few things we know well.’
Seated in his streamlined swivel chair, Stanford Briggs himself is a pointed pivot around which a multitude of agency activities revolve — for he is one art
director who also has control of copy and merchandising.
He is the personification of a broad-gauge executive with the faculty of sizing things up at first squint. With crisp dispatch he connects up his train-of-thought, section by section, and we are off along the right track.
‘A great deal of the con
fusion in advertising art,’ observes Mr. Briggs, ‘ stems from the fact that the artist
and art director do not draw a fine enough distinction between applied art and fine art.’
He points out that the sole function of advertising art is that of directing ideas with the utmost clarity, strength and simplicity at markets where audiences are somewhat untutored in aesthetic refinements . . .
and observes that various intelligence tests made of the American mass market have assessed the average mental age of the typical consumer to be that of fourteen years or less, a
type of audience that is incapable of understanding abstractions.’
‘It is desirable to get down on the floor and deal with simple symbols known for several thousands of years,’ he goes on, ‘and pictures
are the most direct medium of conveying ideas. See how in times of national emergency immediate recourse is
had to the poster for stirring the public.’
Candidly he declares that there aren’t enough good tellers-of-stories-in-pictures.
Then parenthetically interpolates the thought . . . the history of religion would be considerably different if it had not been for pictures . . . the birth of religious painting in Italy was practically the sole means of the church for talking to a people characterized by a high degree of illiteracy. Pictures “ sold ” them Christianity.’
Even though we have a higher rate of literacy in these modern times, Mr. Briggs
feels that it is dangerous to depart very far from an elementary approach, and with fine
grained comprehensions, he continues this line of thought: ‘Advertisements, by and
large, are too complex — fundamental ideas are too covered up with intellectual gymnastics and symbolical impedimenta. It takes infinite sophistication to be simple, to peg high-falutin’ notions and learn how to nail things on the head. It was Madame De Staёl, wasn’t it, who said that she didn’t have time to write short letters?’
Listening to Stanford Briggs has a pleasantly unnegative way of causing one to discard a lot of half-proven notions that have, one suddenly senses, floated aimlessly and too long in one’s conscious
ness. His is that forthright integrity of articulation that jibes with the inner workings of one’s make-up.
After a minute or two of quietly poised deliberation, he goes on: ‘In advertising
one deals for the most part with emotional fractions, not
intellectual fractions — with people who are pushed this way and that way by desires. It is the business of advertising to build up around various objects an unqualified sense of satis
faction — and in doing this an emotional language is used that cannot always be a rational language.’
Stanford Briggs has scrutinized closely and with interesting conclusions the various evolutions or con
vulsions that have taken place in advertising art during the past decade or so. ‘I sup
pose,’ he opines,‘ the taproot
of the convulsion started in France with the post-impres
sionists to whom can be attributed the desire to get away from realistic forms. This grew and manifested itself in futurism, cubism, vorticism, dadaism and a thousand and one other attempts to escape reality.
‘The influence of the French abstract aestheticians,’ says Mr. Briggs, ‘ had its effect on advertising by producing illus
trators who became less and less interested in mass communication and became increasingly self-conscious.
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Layout and copy : McCann-Erickson Co.