AJ+ is made up of a diverse group of artists from around the globe: storytellers, explorers, creators, dreamers, innovators, and visionaries. We seek to craft engaging stories that connect and resonate with our audience.
Art direction is a term that is often used in conjunction with branding and design work. AJ+ strongly believes art direction is storytelling and a necessary component of any editorial formats we produce.
In AJ+, we constantly encourage our artists to express themselves uniquely and authentically. The creation of original material and a variety of visual styles to make complex stories digestible and understandable.
In the digital medium, doing things differently is crucial to remaining competitive in the market. This involves solving platform user experience and UX difficulties and imagining the possibilities where others see the impossible. And not allow the platform to limit our creativity, yet we stay steps ahead.
Creativity does not emerge suddenly or by repeating the same thing over and over again. Working with four languages simultaneously, English, Arabic, Spanish, and French, led a new "school of thought" in creating original material; this brings a new set of difficulties and a new perspective. It's also tricky since there isn't a specific creative problem to solve; instead, it's more of a laboratory to experiment in, challenging us to think outside the box.
"Playing it safe" or "it's working for us, we don't need to change" are characteristics of the conformable zone mindset that we want to avoid at all costs. One of the challenges is to stand out and concentrate on generating distinctive, high-quality, creative, original styles that are intriguing, informative, and engaging for our audience in order to best serve the storyline.
At the begging of each project, we must first establish a mood and tone. and keep asking, "Is there a consistent tone and message that goes throughout the story?" Is motion graphics, illustration, or video editing a better way to tell the story? These factors must be considered while developing a creative direction for the storyline.
When two formats are combined, incredible results can occur. Adding hand illustrations to collage motion graphics, for example. This is just one of the many ways we put Picasso's advice to good use: "Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."
AJ+ has always been a mobile-first community; as a result, we approach each social platform differently; rather than using a single video published to multiple platforms, we restructure and repackage the concept to meet each platform's user experience and behaviour while remaining authentic and bold.
As storytellers, we're always on the lookout for new and fresh ways to tell compelling stories that are simple, bold, direct, and quick. In AJ+, we have successfully made creative and editorial work together to create immersive and imaginative content; with the help of audience behaviour and platform UX, we have successfully engaged our audience deeper with the story and encouraged them to return for more.
