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:
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.


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