Visual Design Pillars By Neil Blevins Created On: Sept 4th 2024 Software: None
Note: This is an excerpt from a much longer tutorial about creating
Art Bibles. This page goes
into a few extra helpful details, but if you
want even more information, please visit the other tutorial afterwards.
Visual Design Pillars are a set of Keywords that help define the look a
set of designs, an alien race, or a whole fictional universe. They are
the most important elements from which everything else related will
derive when creating an entertainment project, and are used to create
visual consistency.
Visual Hook vs Visual Design
Pillar
Some
people use these two terms interchangeably, and
that's ok. For me, I usually use the term Visual Hook when dealing with
an individual or small group. And I usually use Visual Design Pillar
when refering to a larger group like a species, project or entire
universe.
So, as a practical example, here are the three Visual Design Pillars
(sometimes abbreviated as "Pillars") of the "Desert Society" from "The Story Of Inc"
book project,
a Narrative Artbook I co-created with friends, an illustrated story
about a man and his robot on a desert planet:
So in the story of Inc Book Project...
While we're on the planet, all visual design decisions should focus on
"Desert", "High Tech Scrap" and "Epic Scale".
So for example, if we have metal on the planet, the metal should be
rusty and damaged, because that's how metal would look in a desert.
Do you want to include some beautifully polished metal in the story?
This is to be avoided, or if it is in the story, it should be there for
a compelling story reason, because it won't visually match with your 3
pillars.
Another example, we need to make chairs for people to sit in in the
Oasis, a desert city. In the story, the city is made up of bits and
pieces recycled from a crashed starship. So this is where our second
pillar "High Tech Scrap" comes in, everything in the city should be
made from broken bits of the high tech generation ship. Hence the final
designs of the furniture...
Notice chair 2 for example, it might be made from the old broken coil
of an engine part from the spaceship.
And finally, "Epic Scale", when deciding the shape of say architecture,
or the rock formations in the desert, make everything huge, avoid stuff
that appears tiny, unless again, it has an important story point for
why it's different from everything else...
Be Specific
Be as specific as possible when choosing Visual Design Pillars, don't
use words like "Strength" or "Integrity", words that have a ton of
completely different meanings that can be confusing. Use words like
"Brushed Metal" or "Delicate Lace Clothing", these choices have less
ambiguity and are more actionable as an artist turning the Design
Pillars into concept art.
