Today we interview Eric Tucker of Day 1 Collective as he talks about the valuable role of 2d renderings in his design process.
Discover why tried & true 2D renderings are still King, get some tips on communicating effectively with clients, and learn how he saves time by assessing the minimum level of detail needed for any given rendering.
Introducing Eric Tucker
I started Day 1 Collective with several partners who shared a vision for delivering exceptional experiences, experiences that captivate and energize people. We serve the live events and experiential marketing industries by designing and bringing to life custom immersive environments, branded decor, and interactive displays. We work at any scale and with any material to provide creative solutions to our clients’ unique needs.
How do renderings help your design process?
Photorealistic renderings are extremely helpful when we want to eliminate any ambiguity about the product being purchased. Since all of our products are custom and almost always being built for the first time, there is usually no existing product or image to reference.
Renderings complete the proposal by complimenting the written descriptions we provide in our quotes and SOWs. This is particularly necessary when working with new clients who don’t know what to expect from us. As our relationships develop, we lean less on renderings, because we are able to use our words and trust each other to be on the same page.
What tips can you share?
Be careful of overkill. It’s easy to get excited about diving deep into a design and producing a perfect rendering when someone really only needs a rough sketch or even a mood board at that point in the project. My team and I wasted a lot of resources early on by making full photorealistic renderings for projects that would either go in a different direction or get abandoned completely.
We now have a much better method for needs assessment that gets clients what they need when they need it and keeps our design team from getting bogged down with unnecessary work. We determine at what point our clients (and their end clients) are at in the ideation/ conceptualization phase of their project. If they are really early on, it’s likely they want to consider a lot of options, so we will usually make a series of quick sketches and/or mood boards to rapidly iterate through ideas, knowing that the majority of them will get rejected right away.
Good indicators of where they are at include whether they have decided on a budget, selected a venue, established KPIs/objectives, or identified projects they’ve seen others execute that caught their attention.
Thoughts on 360°/VR tech?
In general, I am all about immersive experiences, and these technologies make that even easier to attain. As they relate to rendering and visualization, I am very excited about the possibility of giving my clients free rein to explore our designed environments ‘in person’ before we’ve actually built them.
Currently we rely on static views or sometimes videos that we determine are the best way to view the products, but it would be great if we could leave this decision in our clients’ hands.
