oren meets world: stussy's art direction playbook: brand building & visual aesthetics

All right, so today we are a bit outside of our normal environment. We are here in London. I am en route to Paris. I'm actually giving a talk tomorrow here in London about art direction and social content. I want to take some of my art direction thoughts I've been preparing for this and then give y'all a really interesting case study of one of my favorite brands, Stussy. So in some of my previous art direction videos, we covered the core of what art direction is. We've gone in depth into how you can apply some of its concepts to things like a white background shoot. But in this video, I want to use Stussy's pretty incredible canvas of all their various ads and campaigns over the years to talk about a couple of crucial concepts that any art director or any brand making art directed content should think about. We're gonna cover text and treatments and building the iconography of your brand into art direction. We're gonna talk about using your logo as a core portion of how your brand comes across digitally. We're gonna talk about the lifestyle of a brand and how that extends into art direction. We're gonna talk about the people of your brand, the original Stussy tribe and the rise of what influencers call the homie lookbook. And then we're gonna talk about developing brand signatures and through lines and using them over time, all with tons of examples. Let's lock in. So first, why Stussy? So as many of you know, I actually grew up in Hawaii, in Honolulu, and the first shirt that I ever got was actually Stussy. I remember being in the surf shops with all the brands you'd think of, Quicksilver, Billabong, et cetera, but there was something about this brand and the designs and what was around it that was just immediately special. It was the first thing I'd ever bought with my own money that was like a fashion piece. And it's crazy seeing that brand still today, like here on the streets of London, you'll see the logos like all around, all the way to where I live in Orange County, which is now where the Stussy office is. And seeing a brand that has maintained its cool like throughout that time, it's had some dips and errors, but the fact it's been able to go there and survive from when I got that first t-shirt 20 years ago to today is a pretty incredible run. But also you'll see their content permeate mood boards throughout all of those eras because they're a campaign-first brand. When you really look at Stussy's marketing, it comes down to the product itself and who wears it, and it comes down to visual, photo, art-directed campaigns. They're run as ads and magazines that are now put out across their social media and into the kind of network of blogs and news that we put out. But really every single thing, at the core of its marketing, they do very little else besides put out incredible art-directed shoots. And it's funny, where I live now in Orange County, in Santa Ana, Stussy has an archive store. It's one of the best pieces of marketing and kind of like secret lore I feel like a company can have. Where you go to this old downtown arts area, there's not a ton going down on there, but it's burgeoning for where we are. And they have stuff from Stussy collections for the last decade. They basically slowly roll out things from anywhere from 10 years ago to five years ago to a year or so ago. You can basically access a very careful collection of things that would otherwise be sold out online in like a tiny shop in this really fun area. And seeing a brand that's so intentional about its access, about its art, is something I feel like a lot of brands, whether fashion or not, can learn a lot from and aspire to be like. Let's get into some of these campaigns. I'm gonna start with this Birkenstock campaign. Stussy has extensive collaborations that are always anchored in art direction. And this campaign in particular, they are doing a lot of hedge trimming, gardening, all with their logo and iconography at the center. And this is a great way to talk about iconography as a centerpiece for art direction and why your iconography matters as a brand. Let's look at it this way. Say you have iconography for your brand, it goes on your t-shirts, et cetera. Great, that's step one. When you're able to permeate that into what you actually put inside the concepts of your campaigns, you're taking it to another level. So in this Birkenstock campaign, you can see they have hedges trimmed to look like the Stussy 8-Ball, to look like some of their key iconography. And when you think about art direction, your team sits down to come up with a campaign and you have a concept saying, hey, we wanna work with gardening. We wanna be able to do something on a beach. We wanna do X and Y. Usually, you're basically throwing on the board people you have access to, locations you have access to. Now, when you have a really strong iconography set, all of a sudden this becomes much more inherently ownable as a brand. So for instance, Stussy can go, okay, in the selection of people we have, maybe for this shoot we can either get a fire eater or we could go work in this garden with someone who has immaculate ability to cut various trees. They say, okay, let's now apply our iconography to that. They could cut the trees into whatever, but if that's actually our Stussy 8-Ball, that becomes a much more interesting visual thing immediately connotative of the brand. And this is something you'll see they've done through generations. I highly encourage any brand with iconography to do. And if you don't have iconography, how can you begin to develop those symbols that go with it? Obviously, they've been around long enough to be associated with kind of legendary versions of these. But when you begin thinking about your iconography, you wanna think the same way. And a brand I think has run this playbook really well is this brand 2J's, I believe it's from Spain, where you'll see they will have their kind of logo iconography and they'll be running it like in huge metal sculpture or it'll be on fire in the desert. And they're kind of taking that same playbook applied to their iconography. This ties really well into this next segment, which is building the cult of your logo. We've talked so much about art direction and just like making interesting photos, making content that will stand out. And this video really hinges on like how do you incorporate your brand correctly? How does branding really tie into what you do from an art direction perspective? So there's this iconic shot of the Stussy logo in treatment in a sunburn. And you see it has multiple variations of their logo and iconography. I also love this shot, which is a drone shot of the Stussy logo basically mapped in the sand on a beach. And in our era now, people will be asking, oh, is this AI, is this CGI? But like, you know that this is the kind of brand that will go and actually execute this kind of thing. We'll actually create a real sunburn. We'll actually employ an artist to do this from the air on a beach. It's part of the lore of the brand that these are things that are real. And if you're in this kind of time now and you wanna do that same thing, you now have the ability to add behind the scenes content to help tell that story and show the depths with which you're willing to take your brand lore. But you'll notice that front and center inside, not all these campaigns, but plenty of them, is that logo and iconography. Even this awesome campaign, and we'll get to the people and the people of Stussy in a minute, when they're playing dominoes, they're spelling out the Stussy S. And this is tied over into print for them for decades. So Stussy's most recognizable initial art direction was they would take these shots, lifestyle shots of people in their community, often in black and white, and they'd have the hand styles of the kind of graffiti roots of the brand. It would be all around in a border. And eventually those would turn into just kind of like additions on the page. But you're basically building a toolkit from there. If you look at your brand's toolkit, you go, we have iconography and then we have typography. In this case, with the graffiti tie-in, they have pretty extensive typography they can use with it. And then you have the actual logo itself. Like that is a visual toolkit for post application. And something like this is interesting when done over time. And especially, this isn't just like a cool type treatment. It ties into the lifestyle and culture that the brand was embracing as well. But that becomes your basically visual like post-processing toolkit or toolkit of what you can incorporate into the shoot. And no one has done that better than what Stussy has. Next, we're gonna talk about the lifestyle tie-in. And we're gonna get into people. So Stussy started as a surf brand with a significant amount of like hip hop, skate associated roots. It really has that association of Laguna Beach, of places like Hawaii where I grew up. And they've built that pretty significantly into the feel of the brand. But they've done it with like the wideness of any action sport, right? One of the most iconic shoots they've done was this racing shoot with their branded car, with the helmet coming out of it, with the motion that's happened. They've embraced that action throughout their kind of brand history. And this is when we talk about when we say the lifestyle adjacent. There's a lot of brands now whose lifestyle is basically being fashionable or being streetwear. But it was important to think about Stussy as adjacent to basically anything action related, any motorsport, any kind of surf sport that has the right connotation for them. They've shown within these campaigns. And it's often not some like big sponsored rider or famous person either. It's just people partaking in the activity. But it's that sense of motion. It's that sense of action. It's an extension of the lifestyle. And again, when you have your art direction toolkit as a brand, you now have, okay, here's my iconography. How can we incorporate that? Who do we have access to? Okay, here's our lifestyle. If we're looking for an idea for a shoot, we're action adjacent. All right, we wanna make sure we can incorporate motocross or racing. Like that now is all things when you look at the board, you begin to have, you've honed in on the choices that you have. You can make interesting decisions within. All right, so in these videos, I don't wanna just give case studies. I wanna actually show you actionable work with some of these same concepts look like for someone like me day to day. So I use Milanote to organize my creative workflow. Milanote is a tool for creative organization. And it graciously agreed to partner on this video. So I'm gonna show you how I use my art direction master boards like this one you see here inside Milanote. So I do a lot of work in multiple categories, cosmetics, apparel, consumer package goods. I have one master board for each and I'll do what I did here. Anytime I take a project and wanna present it or talk about it with the team. So this is a bunch of concepts I've pulled from my various boards and put into one. How is this different from a mood board and what makes this workflow special? So inside Milanote here, what I will do is I will take between three and let's say eight or nine images or videos and I can embed Instagram and TikTok in here. One of my favorite things about Milanote. I will put them in these big boards. Each one of these concepts will have a title. It will have a couple example shots. I don't wanna go too far. I don't want a whole mood board. I just wanna be able to visually show an idea so anyone can look at it and be like, okay, I get what you're going for. Then I will note about what would make this special or ideas that I have. So for instance, like this same kind of lap shot style, but we'd use an ultra wide to show more of the surroundings. We're gonna have a series where there's dogs and cats on the lap as well or odd pets. Going down to these vending machine shots, I have a note about how much it costs and how long it would take to actually get a custom vending machine. I have some of these shot ideas for reels like a person buying it or shaking it to get it out or some models tipping it over or a day in the life of someone restocking like an oddball, like a cosmetics vending machine. Then what I will do is in presentations and in brainstorm sessions, we'll actually go through a bunch of these ideas. Sometimes it's just a handful. Sometimes it can be like 20 or 30 to gauge what people like and don't like. Add some notes on here and I can literally just grab a note and drag it on screen and be able to put notes while conversations are happening. And then what I'll do is I'll take everything that people like from the brainstorm session. I will make a new board and I'll put those in there. We can collaborate on that one, add comments. People can begin to add their own imagery and really take advantage of the power of a creative tool like Milliman. So if you're looking for an exercise you can do for art direction ideas for your brand or to get their creative wheels spinning for your own work, I would suggest making a lot of these little idea boards. So basically taking a master board, getting three or four images that attach to a concept, thinking about how you can make it different and just laying a lot of those out. So you begin to have a framework you can go back to because too often we'll have those visual ideas, not put them anywhere and then forget about them. And this is a really useful format you can do to quickly review your own workflow or to go through something with a team. So you can sign up for Millanote for free with no time limit at the link down below. Highly recommend it, it's a tool I use every day. Now I wanna talk about the Stussy Tribe and how that ties into this idea of the homie lookbook that's really popular now. So from the beginning, Stussy has taken portraits of people in their community. They were known as the tribe early. And it's funny, I actually worked with someone from that original Stussy team, a previous brand I worked at who would talk about the heyday of those people and being invited to it and being like a member of that community is like a really awesome part of his life. And something has continued now where you see that inside all these campaigns, whether it's called collaboration or not, they're featuring these interesting people and people that are significantly real. And whether that's something like when they did their campaign with Dries Van Noten where they have Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers in his element and they're showing the photos of that to various artists that they've been connected to over time to just the models they have. There is an integration of people that are in a very real sense throughout the brand. But the real, the hey, this is part of our community, these are the people we know is like an extremely important concept. Because you've seen this now from ALD who shot with all their friends and family out inside New York City, to people like Brigade in New York who have all their kind of friends as centerpieces of their campaigns. There's this really important concept of replacing models with just people you know, with real people because how clothes fit on models isn't how clothes fit on actual consumers. And the same thing goes for how cosmetics look on people or really any of the aspects. Like if you put some piece of furniture inside a gorgeous home, that's a significantly different than what's reality and consumers embrace reality more and those stories tend to be more real. And Stussy from the beginning was showing, hey, these are the people inside our community, the people that we mess with. And by extension, you can look at that as a community you're basically buying into by buying into the brand. And I would encourage brands now to really think about that too. And it's not just, hey, I'm gonna use my friends in my photos versus like employing a real model. It's more of, is there a story that we can tell underneath that? Because that becomes the more interest of the art direction. Before I came here to London, I was in New York and we talked to the team from Brigade and they would be having this conversation like, oh, well, my friend does this really interesting thing. And so I actually designed a piece of clothing that kind of inspired by that. And we wanted to do a lookbook around this really interesting thing he does. It wasn't just like, hey, I wanted to put Carl in the lookbook because he looks a certain way. It had to do with his story and the things that like inspire them and do that. That's a really great way as a brand to, again, look at that toolkit. Because now when you say, I have my iconography, I have this lifestyle I'm adjacent to, now I have all these people that are coming in and out of my life that maybe their stories can hinge into the art direction of the campaigns that we're trying to do. And now your world is starting to build out, kind of cataloging that on a whiteboard or a Notion doc or whatever it is you're really beginning to build. So companies are world building by taking all of this together. Like what we're talking about here is really like world building for a brand and how art direction plays into that. And I think every brand should have its range of people that are a part of that universe they're building and understand the power of the portrait of those people. What is their angle? Going back to Brigade, they have a series where it's like medium format photos of basically all their friends, but they have incorporated the portrait idea into their brand. Stussy had this original idea of, hey, we're gonna have photos of people out and about together. And then we're gonna have our hand style design around it and they're gonna be black and white. There's very different approaches they have. I encourage you to think for the people that you know that are engaged with your brand, what is that kind of portrait? What is that style you can embrace over time to showcase those people? And it can obviously be more than one or you can do it in campaigns. Another way I do think an important part is how you're capturing the people in your community and incorporating that into your content. So next I'm gonna walk through some of the concepts that Stussy's used that are recurring themes in their content. And then we're gonna go summarize all this into a playbook for kind of brand art direction. But one of the other themes you've seen deep within what Stussy's done is surrealism. So they'll do things like incorporating this dinosaur into the shots. And you'll notice again, iconography, like the eight ball logo is the back of this tire wheel cover. But for a significant amount of time, there was a like kind of oddball dinosaur inside a number of these campaigns, right? It's the kind of thing where if you're flipping through a magazine, if you're stoned in whatever era that was, it's like, oh, it's a dinosaur. Like they're kind of incorporating this like thing that makes everything seems a little bit more strange. And that's a great theme. And I think brands all need a couple of these themes they can go into and back to and recurring things. They don't have to be serious. What I like about this is there's a lot of really serious Stussy shoots. There's a lot of really community driven ones. And there's just this like fun era that like, again, doesn't match perfectly, didn't last forever, but like was a part of the brand and showed its other side. Then we have this other segment they have of like urban action and people and who is wearing the brand and showcasing that from these like street side shots of like this girl flicking off the camera in New York to these guys playing dominoes, which I feel like is one of the most iconic Stussy shoots of like recent memory. But what you're doing with shoots like these is you are showing people that aspire to be in these places or look like this, like who wears the brand, who they are adjacent to when they wear it, and you're creating that story. And again, it's not models. That's why I think this is really important and how to think in art direction where you can think in art direction in terms of what story does a model tell, but you can also think of what is this scene and setting and people like in a location tell. And for brands that are from a place or want to aspire to be related to a place, I think it's a really important concept to have as you think about shoots. And the last is the car signature. You'll notice that in so many of these shoots, Stussy uses vehicles. And there's a lot of brands that use vehicles in one way or another, but they basically use them for framing. Like this shot that goes like through a car door or someone sitting in the truck bed or this entire campaign they did where there's really interesting cars on either side. You actually can't even see the full amount. You kind of have to wonder, oh, I think that's a whatever, or I think this is this vehicle. You can actually get the whole picture. It makes you want to learn more about the shoot. It was a really engaging way. But they're basically using it not as a primary, not as this photo is cool because it has a car, but as a set in setting that brings depth into what they're art directing. So if you look at this whole toolkit that we described, this surrealism, this capturing of the friends and community and the family, these urban settings, this idea of the vehicles, and then their iconography that's kind of stretched across not all, but many of these, the treatments of their logos and the hand styles on top of them, that is their art direction world. Every campaign you see from them operates within these boundaries and with these through lines. And if all of this is on a board and you are a brand preparing for to doing campaigns, you have a really solid sandbox with which you're able to play in. And so your job as an art director, when you're working with somebody, is to basically outline this sandbox. Like, what are these things? And your job as a brand is to be able to have a world where you actually created this. So to run that back into a playbook, the first thing to think about is what is your iconography and how can it last? Like for my brand, I had this really big V. It's almost a check mark. You know, it has that like, the idea was, hey, let's create something. We could make big, we could fabricate. And same thing with like, you know, the folders and this archives idea. And you've seen at Complex Con, I had like a massive folder. And there's like some of these kind of ideas of like archives and archival or design department focused brand. That's how I'm kind of thinking about that is how can I build that iconography into many things? And the second thing is, are you building logo worship, right? Are you making your logo a centerpiece that makes people want to have it on them? And this is hard because for a lot of people, when you really look at your logo, you may not have that. And you may not have that ability also to be easily integrated into campaigns or easily kind of like put on it. And like the treatments might not be there. It makes you really think about what your iconography looks like and the power of it. Then there's what lifestyles are you adjacent to, right? And I think about this with my brand, where I'm working with Garrett, who's like a rodeo photographer, inspiring rodeo photographer, and the connections to kind of that world for the brand. Same thing for the like the ultra car enthusiasts. Like mine's not just like any car, it's people that, hey, say, hey, I'm gonna take this time and dedication and money out of my life to be the guy with a 90s Ferrari, to be the person who's restored like X or Y. Like some of these adjacent pieces that you begin to put together. And like making gear that is exciting for those folks. Like, so I sell car mats at Valuable and my car accessories, right? And the people that get them are the people who have like this project car or this thing that they're really proud of or got that, you know, hey, I went and got this specific thing and now I wanna have my personalization on it. They wanna have that like attachment to it, they'll go grab the car mats. And then you'll see it like time and time again, the people that end up getting it are people either like with this really specific vehicle they aspire to have, or who are like have a project they've undertook where this kind of adds another layer of depth and lore to that project. And then what is your portrait philosophy? You're gonna have all these people around you, whether it's your customers, your community, whatever, how are you capturing them? What is your photo and art direction style for that? It's a worthwhile exercise to think about. And then last, what are those additional themes? What are those recurring things that are going to be able to kind of work through that? For example, in my brand, I do some of these like storytelling carousels, those like captions where they're almost movie-like, is like a recurring theme where I can connect things together. This kind of like heist, almost like intelligent crime adjacent thing that can kind of continually perpetuate. We're adding this other visual layer on of like, you can always think about, okay, if we have a horse, there's something that like immediately ties the brand into it by just being in all these traditional streetwear scenarios or working with an existing photographer or art director and their look, but immediately we've kind of added this like equine factor. It's like an interesting idea in playing them. But this is what you can learn from the Stussy brand, from their execution. And the last point I'll note is that the campaigns are relentless. Every single thing they do, there's a thought through art directed campaign. Every release, every collaboration, every season without fail. And it's something that where people will say, hey, maybe this time we're just doing the standard lookbook or whatever, like they never do that. It is always something that has intention. And I think that's the same level that you should be bringing to your brand and how art directors should be thinking and laying out their ideas. So I appreciate y'all watching. I'm excited to see what this inspires for you and your brands. Let's go.