Visual Design Pillars By Neil Blevins Created On: Sept 4th 2024
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 Design Pillars are related to Visual
Hooks, but I've found them used in slightly different ways:
A Visual Hook can usually refer to a single unrelated design, or
a set of related designs. For example, your character might carry a
giant sword, which is their visual hook. Or a set of characters can all
carry giant swords, which would be that group's visual hook.
Visual Design Pillars tend to only be used when referring to a
group or a larger project. So one of the Design Pillars of this group
is they all have giant swords. But if only a single character has a
giant sword, this will more commonly be referred to as a visual hook
instead.
Some people use these words interchangeably, but I tend to use Visual
Hook when referring to a single or smaller set of designs, and Visual
Design Pillars when referring to a much larger project.
Practical Example
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.
