What the picture is FOR is more important than what the picture is OF
This is the biggest surprise in any initial conversation. The particular single-family home, multi-use or multi-unit development, office, or institutional building does not determine the price of a project. Be specific about your “purpose and use” in defining your scope of work and it will be the most important step in getting you the right artwork at the right price.
Purpose:
Are the main goals to promote sales or to facilitate a presentation?
For the same building, our recommendation may vary depending on whether you need artwork to drive sales, or if you need materials for a meeting. There are very different audiences with contrasting and sometimes conflicting needs and expectations.
- Presentations: If you need to present to a finance committee for project funding, or to an historic preservation committee reviewing proposed renovations to a street facade, you probably don’t want a 3D computer model. Our experience is that traditional media is more effective in this context. Also, for presentation purposes it is important to keep costs down. We have seen even simple pen & ink illustrations (no color) be very effective at minimal cost.
- Sales: For achieving strictly sales and marketing goals, most initial requests are for relatively expensive options such as animated walk-throughs and full-color, aerial perspective renderings. The purpose may require such artwork, but not always. We have been doing this work for many years, and over 90% of our clients are repeat customers. In the great majority of cases, we will be able to recommend a solution that actually costs less than our clients’ initial request while still accomplishing the goals of the piece.
- Key Features: If one of the goals is to highlight environmental elements such as water features, a neighboring amenity like a golf course, or adjacent high-profile buildings, then an aerial perspective may be the only effective option. However, this is also the most expensive. The priority of keeping a tight budget on artwork demands that only the artwork needed is recommended. If the architectural details being featured as sales points are on the front facade, then a digital elevation will be one of the recommended options, perhaps accompanied by a siteplan.
Use:
Will there be a single piece of artwork used a single way, or are there multiple uses that will require multiple renderings and illustrations. An illustration needed as part of a newsprint advertisement will be a very different piece than the full rendering used 20 feet wide on a roadside billboard, which will still be different than that required for a five-inch wide image in a 3-fold brochure.
In many cases, use will guide the recommended media in the same way that purpose informs decisions about rendered perspective. Here are the perspective options, arranged by increasing complexity:
- Front elevation
- One-point perspective
- Two-point perspective
- Streetscape
- Aerial
The media choices include:
- Graphite
- Pen & Ink
- Watercolor
- Digital- or Photo- Composite
- 3D Computer Model
- Animated Presentation
- Interactive Program
It may seem like a lot to consider, but these points are easily addressed in an initial phone conversation. Once there is a clear purpose and use established for the project, the next steps are to; review the source materials, determine the degree of architectural complexity, specify whether or not there are requirements for landscape treatment, select materials and colors, and schedule delivery. We will address these steps in following posts.
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