Creative Director

A working operating system for the creative-director role, distilled from 16 books and extended with an evaluation engine adapted from smixs/creative-director-skill. It is organized as a router: this file is small and always-loaded; the depth lives in five role files (loaded one at a time, only when the task calls for it) and sixteen book digests (loaded only when you drill into a specific author).

Built for token economy. A typical task loads this router (~small) + one role (~3k) ≈ a few thousand tokens — not the 1.28M-token source corpus. Read deeper layers only when needed.

How to Use This Skill

Fast path: read the user's request → match it to one row of the Route by Task table below → read only that role file → act on its playbook. If the task is scoring, refining, or "is this good enough?", read roles/evaluator.md alongside the primary role. Everything below expands this.

1. Identify the task, then read the matching role file below. Read one role unless the task genuinely spans two.
2. Apply the role's playbook and decision rules directly — they are written as practitioner instructions, not summaries.
3. Drill deeper only when needed: a role file links to its source book digests in books/. Read a digest when the user asks about a specific author/book or wants the full framework.
4. For fast cross-role lookups, use cheatsheet.md (decision rules), patterns.md (named techniques), glossary.md (terms).

Route by Task → Role

Read the role file whose triggers match. Each is a self-contained toolkit.

Mixed tasks (common): a campaign needs idea-generator (concept) + copywriter (execution); a tough design critique needs creative-leader (how to deliver it) + visionary (the quality bar); a pitch needs copywriter (argument) + idea-generator (behavioral levers). The evaluator pairs with any role — generate with idea-generator/copywriter, then score and refine with evaluator. Read both roles only when the task truly straddles them. A design brief that arrives vague needs references/problem-discovery-and-framing.md before the idea-generator; a visual concept that is "just a pairing" needs references/conceptual-design-patterns.md plus the evaluator.

Topic Index → Role / Book

Jump straight to the right file by topic.

• Headlines, body copy, layout, print/TV → copywriter (ogilvy)
• Positioning, brand image, the brief, copy style → copywriter (ogilvy, guts)
• The Big Idea / judging a campaign → copywriter + idea-generator
• Brainstorming, provocation, predatory strategy → idea-generator (creative-mischief)
• Wit, surprise, visual ideas, the "smile in the mind" → idea-generator (smile-in-the-mind)
• Persuasion psychology, pricing, anchoring, decoy, free, social vs market norms → idea-generator (predictably-irrational)
• Feedback & critiquing creative work → creative-leader (making-of-a-manager, crucial-conversations)
• Difficult / high-stakes conversations (STATE, AMPP, CRIB) → creative-leader (crucial-conversations)
• Motivating creative teams, burnout, the Fire Triangle → creative-leader (fired-up)
• Culture, the Five Tribal Stages, core values, noble cause → creative-leader (tribal-leadership)
• 1:1s, hiring, delegation, meetings, scaling yourself → creative-leader (making-of-a-manager)
• Maker→manager transition, stability + challenge, fighting for the team, autonomy vs. competence → creative-leader (herding-tigers)
• Developing taste / "the eye", input diet, references → visionary (the-eye)
• Creative practice, the Source, the Ecstatic, the four phases → visionary (creative-act)
• Product vision, focus, simplicity, end-to-end, the RDF (+ shadow side) → visionary (steve-jobs)
• Visual grammar / composition (basic elements, balance, the felt axis, leveling vs. sharpening, contrast vs. harmony) → visionary (a-primer-of-visual-literacy)
• Information & data-viz design (escaping flatland, micro/macro, layering, small multiples, 1+1=3 clutter, chartjunk) → visionary (envisioning-information)
• Typography & type choice (legibility vs. readability, type as voice, spacing/leading/measure, text vs. display) → visionary (stop-stealing-sheep)
• Finding the insight before ideating (Pollard Four Points, JTBD, Tension Spotting, HMW, Abstraction Laddering) → idea-generator (insight section)
• Idea level / Pollard 7-level taxonomy (business → execution), activation test → idea-generator + evaluator
• Scoring an idea / "is it good enough to present?" / refine to a quality bar (6 weighted criteria, HumanKind + Grey, Gap Analysis) → evaluator
• Emotion Tier (generic vs. specific vs. complex feeling) → visionary + evaluator
• Anti-pitfall rules (specificity test, kill your darlings, serial-order warmup, simplicity as violence) → evaluator + cheatsheet
• Practitioner angles from designer TED talks (habituation, serious-vs-solemn, say-or-show, legibility≠communication, thoughtless acts, data-is-soil) → references/ted-talks.md
• Pitching / presenting work to clients or stakeholders → copywriter (strategy framing, argument) + idea-generator (persuasion levers: anchoring, decoy, norm frame) + cheatsheet (Anchor-First Sequencing)
• Problem framing, concept memorability, ideation by recombination, presenting to stakeholders (design-practice notes) → references/concept-and-insight-in-design-practice.md
• Creative kickoff (goal, who/what/where-when, narrowing), root cause, problem tree, deadline triage, design thinking vs sprint vs agile, concept sketching → references/problem-discovery-and-framing.md
• What makes a visual idea a concept (A+B=C, formula library, puzzle sweet spot, concept-first cover process) → references/conceptual-design-patterns.md
• Personal creative formula, make-first habits, protected thinking time, direction over speed, strategy ladder, review culture → references/creative-process-habits-and-review-culture.md
• Staged idea pipeline (clarify, saturate, incubate, capture), originality as cross-field remix, big/small, team innovation systems → references/idea-pipeline-originality-and-team-systems.md
• Brand positioning, brand voice, personal-brand character, brand story arcs, case-study narrative → brand-strategy-storytelling (this skill keeps the concept, headline and campaign craft)
• Selling and pricing the concept (proposals, pitch structure, budget conversations) → pricing-and-sales-negotiation ch07
• Workshop agendas, brainstorm structure and group decision exercises → workshop-facilitation

Role Boundaries (design team)

The creative director owns the idea and the strategy: insight, concept, message, quality bar, the team's creative judgment. Hand off, do not absorb:

• Visual direction (look and feel, moodboards, style routes, identity-system rules) → art-director.
• Craft and production (grids, type setting, logo construction, files) → graphic-designer.
• Screens, flows, usability, accessibility numbers → ux-ui-expert. Give the art director the concept in one sentence, the audience and the single feeling; ask for the direction instead of specifying fonts and colours. If the work is judged on craft or look, route the feedback to the owner of that decision. Client taste discovery, strategy-to-direction translation and rebrand analysis → art-director ch05-ch08; craft critique, logo ideation and tests, portfolio review → graphic-designer ch07, ch08, ch13.

Book Index

Supporting Files

• cheatsheet.md — cross-role decision rules and quick-reference tables (the judgment layer)
• patterns.md — every named technique/framework, grouped by use
• glossary.md — all key terms with definitions and source
• references/ted-talks.md — 23 designer/creative TED talks distilled, grouped by the role each feeds (supplementary practitioner layer; not from the 16 books)
• references/problem-discovery-and-framing.md — kickoff, diagnosis, root cause, process frames (practitioner layer)
• references/conceptual-design-patterns.md — concept as hybrid meaning, formula library, concept-first process
• references/creative-process-habits-and-review-culture.md — process habits, direction setting, review culture
• references/idea-pipeline-originality-and-team-systems.md — staged idea pipeline, originality as remix, team innovation systems

Scope & Limits

This skill carries the ideas of these books, synthesized — not their full text. It is a thinking and craft aid, not a substitute for the originals. One source — Tested Advertising Methods (Caples) — was in the folder but shipped as a scanned PDF with no extractable text, so it is not included; add it later by OCR'ing the file and folding it into the copywriter role.

Related skill. The copy produced through this skill is LLM-generated and will drift toward AI-slop. The copywriter and evaluator roles hand off to the external humanizer skill for the final "doesn't-read-as-AI" pass on body copy and long-form prose — it catches tells (em-dash overuse, rule-of-three, soulless rhythm) the Ogilvy/Lyons-era craft checks were never written to catch.

The Evaluator role and the insight/Pollard/emotion-tier layers are not from the 16 books — they are a distilled adaptation of smixs/creative-director-skill (HumanKind/Grey calibration, Pollard taxonomy, weighted scoring loop), marked as such wherever they appear. That project carries the heavier version: a 569-case canon, the P01–P18 pattern map, and a full methods catalog. Drop in a curated case subset there if you want empirical saturation calibration here.