by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | Visualizations for marketing
Things from the past, but especially fictional things that are in the future, people love talking about those. Everyone then lets their imagination run wild. And everyone sees something different in their minds eye. So if you have a project or idea that is about past or future, it is helpful make a drawing of it. This will benefit the discussion.
How to go about when showing something that doesn’t exist?
You have to come up with an imaginary image. Not quite imaginary, of course. If you draw a Holocene river, you have contemporary examples from Iceland. If you need to show a non-existent building, cut and paste all kinds of examples together. Or you might ask Midjourney or another AI to come up with something.
Colliding images
So, the image generating part is not a problem. It sets off a discussion.
“Oh, in my head Harry Potter was always much smaller,” says a child who has been reading the books (eminently an activity that conjures up images in your head). An image can thus disrupt the free flow of the imagination. What your team member or client has in his mind may well clash with the image you present to him or her.
“Generic cars”
If you want to talk to a new customer about a logistics solution, you don’t want to show a picture of someone else’s factory. If you want to talk about cars, you need “generic cars,” not a Porsche 911. Because if the new customer responds with “I don’t have a car like that,” or “our area is different,” and then the conversation takes a wrong turn.
You want a drawing with only those features that cause the right discussion.
Small disclaimer: “precise people” may have a hard time with a fictional drawing. Engineers cannot think of a “generic car” or an “average factory”. Geologists always find a schematic drawing “too approximate”.
Big disclaimer: If you depict things schematically and leave out all kinds of phenomena from reality, you are manipulating. That’s a given, with any fictional drawing. But are you being ethical? Is it greenwashing? Do you picture something unachievable?
Still, the reader is prompted into thinking about your subject with this image. About how it things could be, how it could work.
Good visuals invite participation. And that is a great thing.
Let’s start making things up!
There is a relationship between energy yield from incident light and the orientation of houses. (Perhaps this is my best infographic, my simplest concoction)
Excavation in The Hague. The technical drawings that are already there, but you can’t explain anything to the average citizen using those. With these little drawings, you can. Leave out almost everything, and then break it down into sensible steps.
Collage to show that much of the work on the Rijksmuseum happens underground.
Simple drawings to illustrate that rebuilding a lock rarely blocks traffic.
This is not a real house, of course. What should you be able to see (light, warm air) and what not (a lot).
Made-up island surrounded by estuaries, gradually gaining land. This cannot be done with a map or with a real area.
by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | Visualizations for marketing
Let’s expand on animations. All those abstractions you’re bombarded with – think “onboarding” or “innovation” or “sustainability” – they need to be visualised. Groundwater level management is depicted with water trays, case-oriented work with balloons, and shifting warehouses in logistics is done on checkered paper. Those trays of water, balloons and checkered paper in animation are visual metaphors.
What is a metaphor?
A metaphor is a tool in which you use a property of one thing to clarify another thing. So there are two things going on:
The topic: you don’t talk about it, but it is (actually) what it’s about.
The metaphor: You talk about this, but it’s not what it’s about.
A visual metaphor in an animation works the same as a textual one.
Nice, a familiar image
An animation without visual metaphors invites no one into its own incomprehensible world; an animation with visual metaphors crosses over into recognizability. If the visual metaphor is worked out into a stage, with props and actors you can use it endlessly.
What can be tackled with a visual metaphor
In the case of “case-oriented working,” the balloons flying around replace the invisible IT system. An abstraction you then thankfully don’t have to talk about. It is important that the balloons can perform the same tasks as the IT system, otherwise you cannot explain all aspects of the system with the balloons.
In my opinion, the important thing is that the balloons mimic the IT system in a seriously simplified way: they fly everywhere just like that, while real IT is hopelessly complicated. So the balloons need not explain what people do not need to know about the IT system.
How convenient.
The root cause of boring animations
Without a metaphor, the animation simply shows what you already know. Boring. What makes animations even more boring is that clients start with an A4 full of text. The videos are turned into an endless summing up of features. All the information is in text (logical, there are text people at the helm).
Start with the image.
Primal sketch of the organization as connected islands, with the customer at the counter on both sides, and the process in the middle. Hopefully the problem is solved by now.
… because quite a few problems come flying into the organization. Excuse me, cases.
Such a case begins with a citizen complaining, for example.
The complaint is processed by a staff member. She puts documents into the balloon.
Does the metaphor work? Yes, the “case” can also fly outside the organization, to a man in the field.
The metaphor also works when things break down: then an urgent, red, balloon is created.
The metaphor also works to emphasize the portability of things: you can change desks and take the balloon with you, or you can relieve someone, and take over her balloon.
The joke, of course, is that there are also green balloons, they go automatically, no one has to be behind the desk for that and they can spend time on the red balloons.
Real IT systems are much more annoying to look at or hear about. Nice, a metaphor like that.
Click on the image for the video. This plays in a new window (Vimeo would like to set a cookie, which you can reject).
Primal sketch 2: calculating the position of warelhouses and devising routes between them is like playing with cars and boxes on a large checkered paper.
You can also use this metaphor to explain all aspects of logistics.
… Until you’re at mega-scale.
Click on the image for the video. This plays in a new window (Vimeo would like to set a cookie, which you can reject).
Groundwater level management as a “game” with trays of water that can be full, empty or leaky. Here they have sensors to measure them. The mole has a laptop.
If you have seen the trays, you still see them when a city is put on top.
The mole has a miner’s helmet. Which shines on details that are too small to be clearly visible in the scene. If you don’t want to keep changing scenes, or zoom very nervously, then you need something like this.
Click on the image for the video. This plays in a new window (Vimeo would like to set a cookie, which you can reject).
by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | Visualizations for marketing
Commissioning just one illustration made is not very effective.
Working on a system of illustrations makes more sense if you know how illustration software works.
But, of course, the question from a communications department always starts like this: ‘we want to explain how this service works’ or ‘show what this solution looks like.’
1: Think of the reader.
Silly me saying that all the time. But in “normal” companies, the inventors, the engineers, are in charge. These are eager to show what they can do, and how clever that solution is. The reader wants to know “what does that do for me, that product of yours? Would you listen to the buyer, you end up with use cases. Recognizable situations. You can show those.
2: Think about how and where that reader views your image.
You create a hefty visual for the website. But for insta, or twitter, or a trade show, it may not be appropriate. For those channels, you soon come up with a specific section, preferably for one target audience at a time. The illustration assignment then becomes “create an illustration system that allows us to serve all channels”.
For motion graphics or animations, you need illustrations made up of separate components.
3: Think about what you would like to make later on
What you will need furhter on in the process, you don’t know yet. Still: wouldn’t it be helpful to have illustrations in a style and type that you can easily add to later? Then make sure you:
do not work in a specific resolution (create vector illustrations or 3D illustrations that you can later re-render)
do not work in a restrictive color palette (RGB, never CMYK)
don’t get stuck with a peculiar perspective (do everything either “flat,” or isometric, or pure 3D)
Details that are temporary (or fashionable) you want to be able to easily remove or change; work modularly.
The stage
I always illustrate systematically. You start building a little world, so to speak, as early as the first drawing. With each subsequent assignment, this little world continues to fill up with backgrounds, users, scenery, specific applications and newer versions of the products. Just until you can answer each new illustration request very quickly because you have the components on the shelf.
Oh, there’s another point 4:
4: Make sure the illustration method is transferable
Once the style is developed, you don’t want to be stuck with a designer or illustrator. Ideally, you want to be able to create your own expressions with the individual components, even if it’s only a text layer that you can change. It’s even better if style, size and color palette are fixed so that an in-house illustrator, or a cheaper illustrator externally, can toe the line.
Birds, constructed from loose limbs, for information panels.
Growing up godwit chicks through the months. For Natural Monuments.
Robot construction site. For Accerion/Unconstrained Robotics
Prefabricated commercial buildings-facades. For Ewals Cargo Care.
Sustainable roof components, for Cityroofs/Zoontjens.
Like a water board has a workshop, in Illustrator I have a yard full of separate illustrations that feed the system ;-). For information panels for a water board.
by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | Visualizations for marketing
The green building industry is innovative. That means the technology has not yet been implemented, or only in a pilot project. That is usually a very specific building. Tricky to show to a new customer. He would rather see his own future plans depicted.
This is how simple illustrations work for project development.
What you want to talk about hasn’t been built yet, so if you want to show something you end up with a fictional building. And when you do have a fake building, draw it in such a way that your components can show their full potential.
Also, you can draw it in a way that it fits a specific audience, with specific needs. Handy!
Why not realistic 3D?
You can draw super-realistic 3D these days, but then you run into higher costs, and – much more importantly – everything is too precise. You want to leave everything you don’t know (yet) – or which is distracting anyway – out. You can’t do that with precise drawings. Therefore, a simple drawing style is best. The result looks nice and clear; it is obvious that it is fictional.
Easy to talk about, and that’s what’s needed in your first talks with a new client.
Drawing showing different types of sustainable roofing and the components used.
Fictional building showing that green roofs can and should be considered at every stage: design, construction, construction and operation.
Animation for Cityroofs/Zoontjens telling all about sustainable roofing solutions with five target groups combined with five building types. Click on the image to view the video in a new window, at Vimeo.
Well, simple illustrations for project development could not be simpler: provider and client talk about solutions, looking at a building. Text labels and subtitles provide further explanation.
Building the 3D parts of the animation is briefed with sketches and a round of corrections.
Fictional building to discuss exactly the aspects of a particular green roof. Kind of residential/shopping center with parking garage and herring cart (which became Vietnamese spring rolls in the final movie).
Schematic representation of obstructions in Zaandam, occurring during lock reconstruction. (For BAM via Roel Stavorinus)
Yes, you can make it as complicated as you want, and impress. But for conversation, a simple drawing is better.
by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | Visualizations for marketing
‘Think of the groundwater as little containers filled with water,’ an engineer told me. Those containers, that’s a relatable image. It is not strictly true, but – unlike groundwater – one can see it and talk about it. This is how you make your work relatable. How those containers fill up, dry out, get connected and measured is what groundwater level management is about. Easy.
Those containers, that’s the world in which everything takes place.
Among engineers, it’s called water level management networks. That is an abstraction. It’s for internal use, and for spec sheets and policy documents.
What does an idea look like? The visual metaphor
For products it’s simple, you just visualize them. Services and ideas are different, they’re often articulated in abstractions, such as “network” or “innovative”. If you manage to replace those abstractions with an everyday image, if you manage to capture an idea in a single visual metaphor, you’re on your way. Then the abstractions have become relatable.
Another example. A large government organization. ‘A problem in the field has its equivalent inside the organization. It is handed over, all the way through the organization until it’s solved,” I heard a client say. Case-based workflow, he calls it. What does that look like? Something that moves through the organization. Maybe a balloon with a tray attached to it where documents go in, on their way to a desk. That’s where someone takes something out, and puts something in. The balloon can go anywhere, so the work can be done anywhere. (Now, a few years later, a drone would be more accurate, but it lacks the playfulness of the balloon.)
First, see if it works
After finding the visual metaphor, you can determine what can be told with it, and what not. To keep the content from bloating, I personally prefer to start with the voice-over. In a one-minute animation, one can fit ten lines of text. This forces everyone to be concise. Then, if you just record the voice-over and paste it under a sketch movie, you can immediately see if it works before you spend money on the actual animation.
To the animation studio
Now that the message has taken a visual form, and the script has been tested, you can go to an animation studio. A good animator will really move the visual ideas forward. Most animation studios say they also do the preliminary work. I don’t think that’s right. To find the short message in an organization that is not used to finding it, you have to be a solid discussion partner in terms of content.
The end result will be beautiful.
A side note. The question “is there a need for an animation, how do we deploy it?”, you must answer first. That one is for the communications consultants, the marketing people, the content strategist.
The questions that follow, “What’s the shortest story on this subject?” and “How do we get the abstractions out?”, those are for me. Without the answer to those questions, you can’t make an animation. Animation studios usually don’t answer those questions.
Or did I say that already?
Outline of the visual metaphor. You don’t put the house in a wet place, you don’t put the tree that needs water in a dry place. The mole is the Wareco mascot, who knows more about all things underground than any engineer.
The container metaphor tested for explaining active drainage/groundwater level management.
Text labels to point things out in the visuals/animation.
Storyboard. Here you can clearly see how little text fits into an animation. If you want clear visuals for engineers, a lot of meaning has to be converted to images.
The containers can also be a model of a city. It’s on the table, so to speak, with people and processes around it.
Click on the image for the video. This plays in a new window (Vimeo would like to set a cookie, which you can reject).
