Concept Boards

When you create a Concept Board you are ultimately creating a place to collaborate all your stimulus material, comprising of visual and/or text representations of your ideas based on a chosen concept that will inform your design.

You will use your concept board to inform your design ideas such as colour palette, line, form, silhouette, fabrication, embellishments, textures and fabric manipulations.

Concept Boards insure innovative and unique designs are achieved successfully. 

To make sure other designers or current trends don’t influence you it is recommended that you don’t include figures wearing clothing or other fashion accessories.

You want to create a mood with your board. This helps people to understand where your design ideas stem from and the direction your ideas are heading.

The concept board works simultaneously with the research you do based on your concept/brief. One is written expression and the other is visual inspiration and stimulation.

Research can be presented in the form on a short synopsis (for this assignment you are required to write 200-400 words about the Architect you have chosen).

The quicker you can communicate your ideas the better. Visuals help to communicate a mood or feel quicker than verbal explanations.

Concept Boards are usually mounted on large boards so a group of people can easily see them.

Concept Boards can be quite polished like advertisements (movie posters etc), or they could be rough and look unfinished depending on what mood you would like to create as a response to your concept.

Some examples of different concept board designs are:

Collage: Images combined and layered on top of each other

Template: This is a more streamline approach that focuses on colour, texture and fonts in a simple structured layout.

Creative (freestyle): More experimental and creative to produce a more graphic stylised outcome.

Below are examples of a Collage and Template based Concept Boards. Both these boards have been created for an online store selling baby clothing and accessories. Notice how the visuals are laid out and constructed on the page.

Collage:

Images layered on top of each other in a clear presentation.

Template:

Images, colour swatches and text layered out in an organised structured way.

Creative:

Images Blended together

 

Tips & Tricks for creating an effective concept board:

-       Use interesting, high quality images that are stimulating.

-       Focus on the micro and macro aspects of the building you intend to explore

Example:

Micro:

Macro:

-       Don’t use fashion images

-       Keep it simple, clear, neat and uncluttered

-       Use interesting fonts for headings (this font may inform the fonts you use for your presentation boards).

-       Use a manageable size format (a good size is A3)

-       Look at your concept board form far away to check all images can be seen easily (this can help determine weather people can see your concept clearly in presentations).

More Examples of Collage, Template and Creative Concept Boards:

Collage:

Template:

Creative: