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Contract Environments, Inc.
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Monthly Archives: July 2015

The Client Inspiration Board

I have had two clients recently who came to their first meeting with us armed with what I’ll call an “inspiration board”. In both cases is wasn’t technically a board: one just had a digital file folder of pictures they liked. The other had a PowerPoint of pictures. I don’t know if the influence of Pinterest is to thank for this, but I love it.

To anybody whose about to become a design client, this is an excellent exercise to engage in and bring to your first meeting with any of your design team: Architects, Interiors, Engineers, everyone will love you for it.

Why is this helpful?

A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. There is no where that is truer than in design. First, it shows me what the client is thinking. Pictures can evoke a quality of space; the grandeur or simplicity or vivacity. I use words as carefully as I can to describe visual concepts to a client. But no matter how careful I am words can’t always express the quality of a space, color, or texture accurately. A picture is always more accurate. I can say “wingback chair” but there’s millions of them and they can look very different, just like the two examples here.

budget-classic-leather-wingback-chair-Z1qysAlex Wingback

 

“Modern”, by the by, is one of the worst offenders as a non-descriptive word. For many people, they say “modern” and mean “current and contemporary”, but for others including designers “modern” usually means capital M “Modern” as in the Modern movement that dovetails with International Style and Bauhaus from the early 20th century. Those are wildly different things. (For a rather accurate visual interpretation of the differences check out West Elm’s new Workspace line; their splash page lays it out in very nice visual representation)

Second it takes out the guess work. Sometimes I don’t attend the first meeting with a client and I’m asked to come, with ideas, to the second or third meeting. If I’ve been given an arsenal of pictures then I don’t have to guess what I should bring. I can make (more) educated and strategic choices that are in keeping with the pictures. This isn’t to say that I can’t get a sense of a client without pictures. I listen to what my supervisors tell me from their previous meeting, I check the client’s website and use my educated best judgement to determine what the client might respond to. But pictures speed up the process.

Get inspired, pin that picture and show us what you want. You can use a file folder, a Powerpoint, a Pinterest board, printouts and clippings old school style from magazines and kept in a folder or notebook. Whatever works for you will work for us too!

Hands On – an Argument for Printing

As we move forward in a digital age, there is a lot of designing done with and by computers. There is very little hand-drafting in our office and AutoCAD is a staple I cannot live without. However, I strongly doubt that design, architecture, and interiors (and probably all its associated engineering) will ever go paperless. We need paper. It’s a foundation of the industry. And there’s one little word to explain it all: scale.

Scale, in architecture and  design, is the rule by which all drawings are produced. It’s the ratio to compare what’s on the drawing to what will be built in real life. If a drawing is scaled at 1/4″ = 1’0″ (1 ft) that means that a door drawn 3/4″ wide is a 3ft wide door in the real space. When drawings are set up and printed, this scale indicates a lot of information to the builders. This is one of the tools that gives a drawing tangible meaning.

When a drawing is on the computer, while there is a scale, you can change your view so readily, that the meaning of the scale to the eye is constantly in flux. Zooming in and out means it can be tough to judge what you’re looking at and how big it really is. That alone is one reason for printing things off: to check that what you see on the screen is what you think it ought to be. Designers and architects get very comfortable looking at certain scales and can understand space very well from those scales that they use regularly. Printing off and looking at the drawing in scale can give a better sense than looking at the screen, even if you’ve got the screen zoomed to the right level.

Checking your work can also be easier when you have a piece of paper to scratch your notes on.  It’s also easier to have a meeting with a contractor over a drawing on a desk (which is the same document they will take onto the building site with them) than on a power point screen. And that’s another one. I don’t think drawings are leaving the construction site any time soon. Laptops and tablets, while ubiquitous, are still too valuable and sensitive as commodities to leave exposed to dust, paint and other debris on a job site, let alone a new construction site where they would also be exposed to the elements.

Design and architecture certainly walks a delicate balance with technology. Like so much of our society, you can’t get anywhere fast without embracing the tools that technology offers, but there’s a trade off in getting too far from those paper & pencil (or pen) roots. We may not be hand drafting so much anymore, but don’t expect that printer to disappear anytime soon either!