Okay, so I’ve talked a little bit about the trouble with interior e-design.
That "trouble" being how, with all the product that's available online to specify/suggest for clients, you can’t, as a designer, possibly know exactly what each and every finish looks like.
And, most importantly, how it will relate to another product from another vendor. (Although, we’ve more or less fixed that for us :-)
One thing about doing digital boards -- which we now do for E-Design clients and On-Location clients -- that has always bothered me, is that the pictures from one vendor may look totally different from another vendor's offering. The items, such as fabrics, are shot in different light, framed differently somehow, or photographed in a different scale, etc.
So, while you think something might look good in real life, the moment you begin building your sample board you realize the images might be kind of “off” in comparison to what you saw with your own two eyes.
And that, right there, is the trouble with viewing everything on a screen.
So, because we have hard samples (fabrics galore here in our studio, wood samples, metal samples, wallcovering samples, tile samples, etc.) what we’ve started doing is assembling all these samples for a project on our conference table and photographing them altogether. Just like we present it to our face-to-face clients, as photographed below and to the right:
The beauty about this approach is that the client can see the real relationship between each item -- how the blues compare, the whites look, how the tile looks next to the paint, etc. -- all under one kind of light, in the same type of environment.
Big difference, huh?
And the best part... It takes less time!
And we all know that the LAST thing a client wants to pay for is production.
They want to pay for creativity and design, not time spent assembling images together.
Here at the studio we are learning new ways, every day, to become more efficient, to give our clients more design, all the while making sure less time is billed for non-design project work.
Don't get me wrong - we still love doing beautiful digital boards. After all, they're absolutely necessary in order to show a client how their space will look overall.
But for an image of the real relationship between items, this method is working great!
Be sure to check back on Friday.
I’m unveiling a home office design give-away!