The 3D Exhibits design team faces this challenge every day: Our clients use words to describe their brand style. We receive RFPs that ask for an exhibit design that is innovative, engaging and forward thinking. But what exactly do these words mean?
Give any two people the same list of descriptive words and they are likely to form very different images in their heads. The word innovative, for instance might mean an Apple Store ambiance to one person while the person next to him is envisioning a Picasso painting. Both styles are innovative, yet the brand these images represent couldn't be more different.
So when clients come in and request an exhibit design that is corporate, dependable and dedicated, what do we do? We leave words behind and go visual. Creating vision boards gets everyone on the same page, says Jeff Bartle, 3D Exhibits' chief creative officer.
"Images enable us to efficiently gain insight, consensus and a collaborative starting point," says Jeff. As the sample above illustrates, a quick assemblage of images can convey a proposed look and feel much faster and more intuitively than any list of adjectives.
And even more important, images quickly convey the emotion you'd like your visitors to experience when they interact with your brand.
Vision boards—also called brand boards and style boards—have become such a widely used tool that an entire article was devoted to them in this weekend's T, the New York Times style magazine. The article, Human Emotion: The One Thing the Internet Can't Buy by Michael Rock, describes brand as "the emotional payoff on an investment in a particular product, place or individual,"—with the point being that the style board has become a designer's go-to tool for defining what that emotion is.
At 3D Exhibits, we believe so strongly in the power of image to get everyone on the same page, that we've started integrating vision board-creation into the brainstorm sessions we conduct with our clients prior to creating a new exhibit. Get the vp of marketing, the exhibit manager, the product manager and the sales director in a room together with a bunch of magazines, scissors and push-pins and the consensus you achieve is amazing.
Even better, the resulting exhibit design we create from that vision board ends up being right on the mark with fewer reworks and revisions.
Alternatively, this exercise can be done electronically by filling a Word document, Powerpoint slide, or Pinterest board with your chosen and agreed upon images. Do it at your desk and you have the entire internet full of images to select from.
Your vision board doesn't have to be polished to be effective. For instance, the board below made it very clear that this client envisioned an environment that communicated both rugged and modern.
Our 3D Exhibits team wishes more clients would do this exercise internally. For instance, before asking five or ten exhibit design companies for a spec design based on a 30-page RFP, assemble your team and create a consensus style board.
The collage you share will save your designers the time they'd spend guessing what it is you really want—and frees them up to invest that time getting more creative in giving it to you.
What would your exhibit vision board look like?
