Mastering the Art Director Interview: A Guide to Landing Your Dream Job

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Toptal sourced essential questions that the best art direction experts can answer. Driven from our community, we encourage experts to submit questions and offer feedback.

In the first week of a project, how do you get to know a new brand while working on it?

Experienced art directors should have a process for how they familiarize themselves with a new brand or company. This should be well-thought-out and give them all the information they need to start making new campaigns and making old ones better.

Only the best candidates should find this question easy to answer, and they should already have a plan for how they will start working for a company. The plan should include learning about the brand’s current positioning and goals, as well as any campaigns that are currently being made and any campaigns that have already been made. The art director should also get to know the team they will be working with during the first week of a new project. 2 .

How have you mentored or led colleagues on projects in the past?

Art direction is a leadership position, and most art directors will have a team working under them. To be a great team leader, you need to have strong leadership and mentoring skills. The best candidates should be able to look back on their career and think of times when they’ve used these skills well.

Look for candidates who share stories about collaboration with their teammates. Good leaders identify the strengths within their teams and bolster them, while helping compensate for their weaknesses. Art directors who attempt to micromanage their teams often suffer from high turnover and reduced morale. 3 .

How do you measure the success of your role within a project?

There are several ways to judge the art director’s performance on a project. The “right” way depends on the goals and culture of the company. Does the candidate’s answer fit within the company’s definition of success?.

If a candidate for art director only sees success in terms of making money, while the company wants to raise brand awareness, then the fit may not be right. One answer candidates may commonly give is that a successful project is one that they’re proud of. Get them to say more about what makes them proud of a project to find out what they really value in terms of success.

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Can you talk about a time when your art direction helped solve a business problem?

Art directors are in charge of making advertising campaigns, so they are often asked to solve a wide range of business issues. Look for applicants who can show they know how to find business problems and come up with creative solutions.

Candidates should really understand how advertising and related campaigns can help a company improve its position in the market, handle a PR problem, or successfully launch a new product. Watch out for applicants who don’t seem to understand business issues or who can’t explain how their work helps solve them. 5 .

How do you keep your team motivated through tough projects or tight deadlines?

Since art directors are team leaders, it’s important that they possess excellent leadership skills. Being able to guide a group through a tough project or meet a tight deadline is one of the most important ones.

Look for people who are excited about these challenges instead of people who seem nervous about them. Candidates with a lot of experience should be able to answer this question with more than one example from their career. Some may even tell more than one story.

Pay attention to their particular strategies, too. How well do they work with others? Does their style fit with the company’s values and culture? Are they bossy or cooperative? How well a candidate does under pressure will affect how their team works when the pressure is off. 6 .

How do you balance the design aspects of a project with the strategy aspects?

A firm grasp of business strategy is necessary for an art director to be successful. Ad campaigns cannot be successful if they do not fit within the overall brand strategy. Design has to serve that strategy.

Instead of seeing strategy and design as possibly being at odds with each other, the best candidates will see the strategy parts of a campaign as a chance to show off their design skills. Look for art directors who are interested in both strategy and design and see them as two parts of the same whole. 7 .

In your opinion, what makes an ideal team member?

The best people who want to be art directors should know what their strengths are and look for team members who can help them. They should also seek team members who complement one another. It’s rare for one designer to be great at everything, so putting together a team of people with different but complementary skills is key to the success of a project.

Someone who is a good candidate will want team members who fit in with the company culture and can work well together on a campaign. The reasons why the choices were made are more important than the specifics of “ideal.” The candidate should be asked to go into more detail about these reasons. 8 .

For you, what is the toughest aspect of being an art director?

There’s no right or wrong answer here. Depending on how the candidate answers this question, the interviewer should have a better idea of whether they have the right skills for the job. If the things they say they have trouble with are the things the person who gets the job needs to do well, then that person won’t be a good fit.

It doesn’t matter as much if the things they have trouble with aren’t important to the job or can be easily made up for by other team members. It’s also a good idea to ask the candidate how they compensate for those challenges. Any art director with a lot of experience will have come up with ways to handle the parts of the job that they aren’t so good at. 9 .

Talk about your most successful media campaign and how it was created.

Experienced art directors should have numerous successful media campaigns to pull from to answer this question. Pay attention to how they’ve described “success.” Is it how much money they made, how well their team worked together, or how good the work they did?

Make sure their definition of success matches the company’s. Write down the campaigns they talk about and look them up after the interview to make sure you agree with how successful they thought they were and that their approach fit with the brand’s goals. 10 .

What was your least successful project? What would you do differently?

Some candidates may have reservations about discussing their less successful projects. This is a good way to find out if they’ve learned from past mistakes and used what they’ve learned in their work.

Pay attention in particular to what they would do differently. But do they take responsibility for their part in the project failing, or do they blame other teams or members of their own team? Pointing out other teams’ flaws isn’t always a bad thing, as long as they also own up to their own part in the campaign and what they could have done better. 11 .

Describe your process for creating campaigns, from conception to execution.

Any art director candidate should have a well-thought-out process for creating and executing campaigns. The specifics aren’t as important as knowing that they’ve developed a system that works.

That said, there are some things that should be present in any established art director’s workflow. Early on, they should have a phase where they do discovery on the project and define its scope. After that would be creating and designing concepts for the campaign, followed by collecting feedback and making adjustments. The execution of the campaign should also be well-thought-out.

People who are good candidates should be able to change how they normally work to fit in with how the company works. 12 .

How do you incorporate current trends and technologies into your campaigns?

Art directors who are good at their job should keep up with new technologies and trends and know when and how to use them in their work. How the candidate thinks about trends and how they decide whether to use trends or not should be clear from the answer to this question.

The best art directors do not follow trends blindly just because they’re new or popular. They should know when a trend or new technology can help a brand and when it will go against what the brand stands for.

There is more to interviewing than tricky technical questions, so these are intended merely as a guide. Not every good candidate for the job will be able to answer all of them, and answering all of them doesn’t mean they are a good candidate. At the end of the day, hiring remains an art, a science — and a lot of work.

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