Visualising
your ideas

In fact, as product designers, it’s something we do all the time. Visualising your ideas helps you to understand better the product you are designing. Visualisations can be as simple as a pencil sketch on the back of a serviette, right through to a photo-realistic, three-dimensional animation. Different kinds of images help us make decisions about how further to develop a design at every stage of development. The further through the design process we are, the more defined the visualisations become.

When we create images of our designs, whether static, virtual or animated, we improve our understanding of the relationships between a product’s parts, how well colours and finishes work and what various materials might look like. We can check the functional aspects of a design and make decisions simply because we can see a thing that does not yet exist.

Creating visualisations is a normal part of most of the projects we complete. But we have noticed that more and more people are exploring their ideas because of the power visualisations offer them. Visualisations require a relatively low investment when compared, for example, to prototyping.

Visualising your ideas makes a lot of sense in two particular situations; for marketing and sales and for in-house design teams.

Visualisations for marketing and sales
Photo-realistic images of your product allow you to show your ideas to a broader audience. You can use them to gather feedback, gauge interest and even start promoting your product before it is in production. You can use visualisations on your website, social media channels and other digital and hard copy marketing and sales materials. They also help you to build powerful crowd-funding campaigns and venture capital campaigns.

Visualisations for in-house design teams
In-house design teams typically have their hands full doing research and development. It sometimes makes sense for them to outsource the creation of renderings. And we are excited to be able to take on that role now.

We use a range of software for 3D modelling, rendering, animating and producing video including SolidWorks, Keyshot, Rhino, Sketchbook Pro, Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.

Visualisations help you to…

• see your concept before prototyping or manufacturing
• speed up your design process by supporting decision-making
• conduct design reviews
• establish market sentiment before significant investment
• secure investors and pre-sales
• demonstrate the key benefits and functions of your product
• define colour, material and finish
• sell your idea through printed and digital media before manufacturing has started

Visualising your ideas
You can see the full list of our software and take a look at some of the visualisations that we’ve created on our Visualisations page.