fralapo 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.
- Identify the task, then read the matching role file below. Read one role unless the task genuinely spans two.
- Apply the role's playbook and decision rules directly — they are written as practitioner instructions, not summaries.
- 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. - 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.
| Read this role | When the task is… | Source books |
|---|---|---|
| roles/copywriter.md | Writing or critiquing ads, headlines, body copy, taglines, campaigns, sales/marketing messaging, or creative briefs | Ogilvy on Advertising · Guts |
| roles/idea-generator.md | Brainstorming, finding a creative angle/concept, adding wit or surprise, making work memorable, or understanding why audiences respond | Creative Mischief · A Smile in the Mind · Predictably Irrational |
| roles/creative-leader.md | Managing creatives, giving feedback, 1:1s/meetings, hiring, motivating, resolving conflict, difficult conversations, the maker→manager transition, or shaping culture | Fired Up · The Making of a Manager · Tribal Leadership · Crucial Conversations · Herding Tigers |
| roles/visionary.md | Developing taste/vision, setting creative direction, judging quality, cultivating "the eye", typography and type choice, information/data-viz design, or sustaining a creative practice | The Creative Act · The Eye · Steve Jobs · A Primer of Visual Literacy · Envisioning Information · Stop Stealing Sheep |
| roles/evaluator.md | Scoring/critiquing an idea, deciding if work is good enough to present, refining a near-miss concept that scored below the bar, running a generate→score→refine loop to a quality bar, mining an insight before ideating, killing mediocrity | engine layer — adapted from smixs/creative-director-skill |
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.
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)
Book Index
| Book | Author | Role | Digest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ogilvy on Advertising | David Ogilvy | copywriter | books/ogilvy-on-advertising.md |
| Guts: Advertising from the Inside Out | John Lyons | copywriter | books/guts.md |
| Creative Mischief | Dave Trott | idea-generator | books/creative-mischief.md |
| A Smile in the Mind | McAlhone & Stuart | idea-generator | books/smile-in-the-mind.md |
| Predictably Irrational | Dan Ariely | idea-generator | books/predictably-irrational.md |
| Fired Up | Andrew Johnston | creative-leader | books/fired-up.md |
| The Making of a Manager | Julie Zhuo | creative-leader | books/making-of-a-manager.md |
| Tribal Leadership | Logan, King & Fischer-Wright | creative-leader | books/tribal-leadership.md |
| Crucial Conversations | Patterson, Grenny, McMillan & Switzler | creative-leader | books/crucial-conversations.md |
| Herding Tigers | Todd Henry | creative-leader | books/herding-tigers.md |
| The Creative Act | Rick Rubin | visionary | books/creative-act.md |
| The Eye | Nathan Williams | visionary | books/the-eye.md |
| Steve Jobs | Walter Isaacson | visionary | books/steve-jobs.md |
| A Primer of Visual Literacy | Donis A. Dondis | visionary | books/a-primer-of-visual-literacy.md |
| Envisioning Information | Edward R. Tufte | visionary | books/envisioning-information.md |
| Stop Stealing Sheep | Erik Spiekermann | visionary | books/stop-stealing-sheep.md |
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)
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.