Art direction is generally the management of creative processes, and it can be any sort of project! Varying from film to creating websites. It will give you an envision of how something will look, it’s like a journey, a story being told.
Two examples that were brought up in class were the website for the Orient Express in comparison to the website for Ryanair. Two travel websites, with massive differences.
One was an immersive experience, with beautiful visuals that felt genuine, to truly reflect the experience, it felt luxurious, the other one, Ryanair, felt cheap and non-genuine.
And it was all because of the art direction of the two websites.
To make a website interesting, for you to stay and explore its content I would argue that it would need to be immersive, to really capture the attention of the user.
I found a few websites that were immersive that had a story to tell to get a better understanding of what people previously had done.
I stumbled upon this while looking for immersive websites to spark inspiration for my own project, whilst the information alone was quite uninteresting to me, the visual effect that would come as you went further down the website, made it suddenly much more interesting to read about.
Rose Island - The story of a micronation
This is an example of how a simple story can be very interesting with the right visuals and the right storytelling. As I mentioned, it was a very simple story, but it still managed to capture my attention fully from the interactions and animations alone.