Thursday, October 2, 2008

black holes

I had been working with a retail client on look-and-feel, sketching different phases of the retail experience with scenes unique to the new flagship store in Manhattan. The store design crew sent numerous product pics and architectural files to a 3d modeler, who created an animated fly-through for concept presentation to the company's CEO. Except for the fixture design, the layout and most of the interior details were complete. Their boss found the video stiff and unfriendly. Photos of product had been stretched like silly putty around shapes that didn't match the products' proportions. Product was sparsely distributed and -- nightmare to any retailer -- nobody was in the store! Perhaps most painful for the design crew (apart from the uncannily familiar soundtrack) was how details that had not been fully worked out appeared: black polygons! These virtual voids, stole a show that could have been about how well the space was working. The concept was presented again, using quick sketches, and it moved along, approved. Later, a technique was developed to embed the brand's proprietary video ads and music into online sketch presentations.

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