Patience Jones: Hello and welcome to As Built, the podcast from Graphicmachine about architecture firms and buildings, and how both get built. I am your co-host, Patience Jones. With me is Brian Jones, your other co-host. Thank you for joining us. Today, we are talking about visual content. ♪ Dun, dun, dun. ♪ By that we mean photographs, videos, renderings, sketches. Most of the time, I think architects spend their entire day thinking about visual content, so-
Brian Jones: Yes. The perfect version.
Patience Jones: Yes. Well, maybe that's the point, yeah?
Brian Jones: Yeah, little bit.
Patience Jones: Expand on that.
Brian Jones: Architects, in general, tend to post the most perfect version of their buildings online, and that's the only version that ever gets seen. There are rarely process shots. There are rarely shots that show different aspects of the building. It's usually like, the most perfect, perfect, perfect version of the building.
Patience Jones: In one photo.
Brian Jones: In one photo, yeah. And as you can imagine, when every architecture firm is doing this and showing the most perfect, perfect, perfect version of a building, you end up with a lot of sameness, especially on social media. But more importantly, it's hard to distinguish one building from another, because unless you have a background in this, you really don't know always what you're looking at and what problems got solved.
Patience Jones: I think you also run into a problem where you've spent years working on a project and you get one really great hero shot from it, and that's all you have to talk about that project for the next three to four years while you wait for your next big project to be done. This results in kind of the staleness of what you're showing people on your website and social, even in RFP responses.
Brian Jones: It’s important to note that each time you show an image, it has a waning impact on people’s attention spans. The first time they see that image, they say, "Oh, that's a really nice image." The second time, it's slightly less than that until maybe three or four times in, they're not even noticing it at all.
Patience Jones: Or they're like, "Oh my God, there's that image again." Yeah. Which is not the response you want.
Brian Jones: No.
Patience Jones: Firms have so much work that they're doing. I would wager that probably one out of every six projects is what gets photographed and in the particular way that traditionally we like to see projects photographed, and the rest of it doesn't get talked about because, well, we couldn't get the perfect shot of that at the perfect time of day. And that makes it difficult when you're trying to explain to people why you're the right fit for a project. They wan to see what you've done. And your response is, "Well, we don't have that photographed because..." Dot, dot, dot. They assume it's because it's not worth photographing.
Brian Jones: I think that's really important. What is also true is that a building is more than just the structure. And the story behind how it came to be, the people whose life it impacts, that's an important thing as well that sometimes is left out of the equation of how you document a building. For sure.
Patience Jones: A building does not exist in a vacuum. It has things inside of it and it has things outside of it, near it, around it, next to it, that really contribute to why it looks and functions the way that it does, and what are the benefits that it's bringing to the community. Without all of that additional information, I know it's never just a building, but it's also just a building.
Brian Jones: Very true. Finally, each image often is viewed as a singular asset that lives separate and apart from everything else. It doesn't have a relationship to a larger idea within your firm, within the type of work that you do. That's often also kind of the case as well.
Patience Jones: When you have that singular image, if that singular image wasn't taken with social media in mind, you have a singular image that you can use on your website and maybe in a print piece, and that's it. You may or may not be able to crop it to work on social. If it's just one image, it's hard to turn into any sort of video or motion graphic. So, what we are encouraging people to do is to rethink their visual assets and how they use visual content, how they create visual content. We've put a lot of thought into this, seeing what we've seen over the past many decades.
Brian Jones: Yes. But let's not count those right now.
Patience Jones: So why don't you explain?
Brian Jones: We created a program called Dynamist, which is about looking at images for building in a slightly different way, where you're collecting images and video content with an eye towards a larger composition that might be made out of it. In part, it's about both making sure it's context-appropriate for social media and shot in a format that's native to social media. In a larger way, it's a system of images that can work together to tell many, many different stories. That's the bigger thing that's kind of important and at play here.
Patience Jones: I probably wouldn’t go so far as to say it's like a Dadaist approach to photography, but it's [laughs] close.
Brian Jones: A little bit.
Patience Jones: Yeah, a little bit. It gives you sort of infinite ways to present your project in a way that doesn't debase the project or cheapen it. It keeps that same sophistication that architects want, but also with the variety that you need.
Brian Jones: I think that quality is usually the stopping point for a lot of architects. Always when you shoot for social media, the first thing is like, "Well, it won't be a high quality image." With all the advances in technology in the last, you know, five or six years, that kind of is beginning to go down a little bit, but definitely something that people think about.
Patience Jones: Just to clarify, I think what you're saying is that because of all the technology, you can get really high quality social media photos even if all you have is an iPhone.
Brian Jones: Correct, yeah.
Patience Jones: If you're on a job site and there's a really great picture to be had, take it on your phone. Don't think, "Oh, I wish we had the professional photographer here and the site cleared and our lighting brought in." Just take the picture.
Brian Jones: Absolutely. Build up that content library early on in the project, to cover every aspect of it through the completion. Also see if you can get some interviews on other things that could happen relative to the people who are going to occupy the building, because that can be part of telling the story too.
Patience Jones: That's a good point. Think of it as an ongoing story. It doesn't stop when the building becomes occupied or when there's a ribbon-cutting. It continues. The building evolves. People experience it in new ways. And it's good content to go back and revisit, you know, okay, this building that we designed, how is it? What is it doing now? Who is it serving now? What has been its impact over X many years? We hope that this podcast has had an impact on you. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time.
