Riley W., Art Director

Art Direction

Riley W.

The picture behind the picture.

Riley W. is an art director with experience spanning editorial, fashion, and brand campaigns. The focus is the visual language behind the photograph — the casting, the set, the light, the crop — rather than the photograph alone.

Riley spent eight years on magazine art desks before moving to campaigns, and still works like an editor: most of the job is deciding what to leave out.

Selected Work
Halcyon — three black and white campaign posters pasted on a city wall

Halcyon — Art Direction, 2025

Nothing but the Gown

Art direction for a slow-fashion campaign with everything stripped away: no location, no colour, a bare studio wall and one window's worth of light — so the only thing left to look at was the fabric.

Project Super Jumbo — a double-deck airliner at dawn, its tail vermilion with a small white star

Project Super Jumbo — Art Direction, 2026

Tail First

Art direction of an airline livery kept almost bare: a white fuselage, one vermilion tail, a single four-pointed star, and no swoosh. Designed from the tail forwards, because the tail is all most people ever see.

Twelve Pages, One Colour — an open magazine on concrete, a fashion story in which the clothes, the set and the page are all one shade of red

Independent Work — Fashion Editorial, 2025

Twelve Pages, One Colour

Art direction of a twelve-page fashion story for an independent style magazine: every look, set and prop in a single shade of rust.

Set for a Scent — an amber perfume bottle on rippled sand among tall mirrored columns at sunset

Independent Work — Fragrance Campaign, 2024

Set for a Scent

Art direction and set design for a fragrance launch: a landscape of sand and mirrored glass built on a studio floor, and struck the same evening.

Within the Collective

Riley typically leads the look of a campaign — casting, styling, set and the brief to the photographer — and the art direction of identities that live mostly in images. Riley works with V. to fix the idea before anything is shot, and with the collective's photographers and designers so that the picture and the layout are made for each other.

All project enquiries are handled by Creative Director V. through Influence Design Studio.

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