Storyboards and Startups: How Sketching Can Help Entrepreneurs, Angels And VCs With Everything From Elevator Pitches To User Experience Design

(Note: Welcome to the startup and angel investor community on LinkedIn. Please visit the portfolio portion of this site to see other examples of architectural--building, software or otherwise--visualization techniques.)

Entrepreneurs have a lot on their plates--finding pain points to solve, raising funds, choosing between iPhone, Android, and now iPad platforms, cutting through crowded marketplace noise, etc. Great ideas must elegantly solve pain while being fun to use, hyper-efficient to navigate and joyous to spread. UX (user experience) designers know they're going to lose half of their audience with every click, so making mobile and web apps simple, stunning and "sticky" is job one.

UX design is central to any web 2.0 start up conversation. There are many wireframe programs available to help, but the medium is the message, and these aides tend to make the apps they help create look the same. Why not follow the lead of movie directors and entertainment designers and use storyboards to nucleate your vision, get team members on the same page, and communicate to investors in a striking and company-differentiating way?

Taking the metaphor a bit further, UX design is a lot like set design (see samples included) only your stage is held in the palm of your hand (on your mobile device). Providing examples of storyboarding will be a recurring theme in this blog, beginning with some in-progress and very rough UX sketches for a social mobile start up being developed right here in western Massachusetts. (Yes, western Massachusetts. Afterall, we were home to Bo Peabody and Matt Harris's Tripod, so we can certainly do it again.) These begin as rough pencil sketches made in real-time working with developers around a table, and evolve after many iterations into publishable memes that tell your story. I can't tell you much about the startup idea involved here, but the clever ones among you may figure it out.

That's it for the UX stuff I can show on this project. Below are a sampling of storyboards made in collaboration with famed set designer/architect David Rockwell, and several other firms doing work in the entertainment industry.

The moment of Frank's Entry in the staged production of Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Studies for the "reinvention" of the aging Flamingo Casino in Las Vegas.

Thanks for coming, and please stay tuned for more on how storyboarding can help your startup (or startups if you're an angel investor) focus team effort and get to launch faster.

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Ideas For Unemployed Architects, Chapter One: Hot Tub On Wheels

In advance of the hot tub rennaissance sure to happen with the release of the art film "Hot Tub Time Machine," I submit the question: why can't one rent a hot tub on wheels? Can somebody get on that please?

Idea For A Line Of Collectible Children's Toys Based On Winter (& Summer) Olympics

Here's an idea Mary Pat and Spencer had for a line of children's toys based on Olympic Winter and Summer Games. A toy consultant said it was too "Beatrix Potter." (Is that a problem a few iterations wouldn't have solved?) Call me sentimental, but the idea was to reduce the level of "gar-bozh" in the world and get back to something that fostered the imagination. The line was to be placed at POS of ski shops and ski resorts around the world, as option for families looking for alternatives to "more hotel room vacation TV." There's a line for the Summer Olympics, too. As usual, click on any image to make larger.

The Architecture Of Desire: Peep Shows, 19th C. Watercolor Technique and Las Vegas

My job can be tedious, but it isn't always a grind (sorry). As every architectural renderer knows, drawing people is more time-consuming than drawing the exterior or interior of a building. People make or break a rendering. When drawn poorly, they tell the world that you (the artist) don't actually know what you're doing, and no amount of watercolor technique can hide that.

Problem is, drawing them well takes time: time to draw the figures in convincing positions; time to dress them; time to "light" them and paint them in a way that Winslow Homer or Sargeant would be proud of. OK, maybe not that last one, but seriously, when you paint in watercolor, your watercolor technique is who you are, and as a thoughtful person putting their work out into the world, you can't pretend you don't know the work of Homer, Sargeant, Prendergast, etc.

Sometimes that investment of time is less tedious than others. For art's sake, I humbly submit "Peep Show," an entertainment/club venue that I was asked to visualize, (populate) and bring alive for a colorful Broadway director turned Las Vegas impresario. (It's like five renderings in one, so I've included vignettes after the overall view. Also: I wish to acknowledge the important contribution of friend and colleague Chad Rush in helping me get this Sistine Chapel of Soft Porn done on time.)

Click on any image to enlarge, er, um...the image.

Here's the overall view above. Details of the people below. And yes, those are naked women crawling on top of the glass-sealed VIP lounge on stage:)

A Restaurant For David Copperfield

Dining "Half Off." The Magic That Was Almost The David Copperfield Restaurant In Times Square, NY

Many years ago I had the pleasure of collaborating with David Rockwell to design (then do the architectural illustrations and 3D visualizations of) a restaurant prototype for David Copperfield, the famous magician. The concept was part of the genre of destination/tourist entertainment restaurants popular at the time, and this one might have been the most entertaining had it happened. Among the many other delights--levitating tables, waiters disappearing in full view of diners, etc.--was the twice-a-night moment when the maitre d' asked for four volunteers who would like to be, um, sawn in half--I kid you not. The following four views show the design we came up with--heavily influenced by Piranesi's "I Carceri"--for that event,. If you look closely, those of you who know him well will recognize my friend Marty Kapell as one of the people about to dine half off. He's the one in the white sweater vest waving atop the Lady Liberte's hand at the end:)

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David Rockwell, The 2010 Oscars Set Design, Architectural Rendering & 3D Visualization

Is it me, or was the set design the star of the 2010 Oscars ceremony last night? I couldn't get over the coordination between the elegance and beauty of the set as a whole, and the way the individual pieces--constantly rotating in and out to deliver presenters and video walls--never overpowered the people on stage. If you have any idea how much work that takes, than you are as amazed as I am at how flawlessly coordinated were the sets, the people, the production and the camera angles designed to take advantage of it all. It really was a tour de force.

I can't take any credit for helping with last night's design beyond the work we did last year (see below) when David Rockwell first did the design, and the contribution of some early sketches this year used to establish a rough direction, but a number of people behind the scenes do deseve credit beyond what the public is normally aware of. I don't think it's taking anything away from David Rockwell to say that my friend Barry Richards--David's number one collaborator on sets, and design director of one of David's coolest studios (also doing restaurants, high-end apartments, etc.)--was instrumental in realizing last night's miracle. Here are some sketches for the Oscars and for Broadway musicals that David and Barry have asked me to do over the years. Again, congratulations to both and to Rockwellgroup in general for what I truly believe was a masterpiece of set design and set movement.

The World's Most Beautiful Buildings: The Chapel At Ronchamp

When you grow up wanting to be an architect, you learn about the Chapel at Ronchamp at an early age. It's an icon of modern design, as interpreted by the early 20th century architect Le Corbusier. Corbu and Frank Lloyd Wright were a little bit like Madonna: artists so rich in ideas (Madonna? OK, maybe I went too far, but you get the point) that they were capable of remaining ahead of trends they themselves ironically created, reinventing themselves and opening up new veins of ideas in their art several times over their careers. 

Ronchamp represents a late stage in Corbu's career when, like many poets, he began to see beauty in traditions and forms he might have held in contempt during his revolutionary youth. The building is based on a traditional plan, but it's striking forms are pure modern invention, some say based on a nun's hat.

We went to see the place at the end of a trip to visit Spence in Leysin, Switzerland, during his junior year of high school at the American School of Leysin. I walked around taking these exterior photos, then went inside.

Given the expectations set by the exterior, one is kind of shocked by the intimacy of the interior. One discovers the acoustics are insane. One gets the uncontrollable urge to do a Gregorian chant.

Did any of you have a memorable experience visiting Ronchamp? I'm hoping none of you say "Yeh, one time I was there and this douchebag was singing inside."

Even though I make my living doing architectural watercolor renderings, and architectural rendering, watercolor techniques, pen and ink techniques, watercolor rendering techniques and architectural rendering techniques, I still  want to go back to doing architectural design someday. There's nothing like the feeling of creating a building.

Your High School Guidance Counselor Got It Wrong: Why Architects Don't Have To Be Good At Math And Don't Have To Draw Well

One of the worst myths ever perpetrated on high school kids contemplating careers in architecture is that architects have to draw well and be good at math. In 30 years of being an architect, I have yet to see a single architect "need" to know any math beyond simple geometry, and yet the profession as a whole has probably lost tens of thousands of talented kids (especially girls) because of this lazy meme propagated by well-meaning guidance counselors. (Btw, please call me if your kids are thinking about architecture. I genuinely enjoy discussing the pros and cons of being one, especially exploding these myths.)

The same goes for drawing. Yes, architects are supposed to draw well, and many of the greats have always done so, but some of the greatest use nothing more than scribbles to communicate their ideas to workshops of apprentices (think Frank Gehry, Louis Kahn...) and this is as it should be. Why? Because over-drawing--drawing too realistically or too sentimentally--discourages the accidental discoveries vital to the design process and miraculously present in the final work of art. I say "miraculous" because it is nothing short of miraculous when an architect--or painter, or musician, or sculptor--spends hundreds of hours on a work which manages to transcend both its materials and the tedious steps involved in making it. Said another way, there is a kind of magic in every work of art: it's usually impossible to look at it and understand how it was done.

Here is a house I am designing for a best friend who is moving to Big Sur, Caifornia. The site is on the water, and when you're there, all you are conscious of is the sun on your skin, the warmth you feel when the chilly wind stops blowing, and the sound of the Pacific at the western edge of the property.

So why do these design sketches look so "bad" (considering I'm a "renderer")? Because it's not about making pretty drawings at this stage; it's about maximizing the chances that your pen will slip and lead you to a bunch of accidental discoveries that defy logic and keep the end product magic. Realistic drawing skills and math only get in the way of the process. Does an aptitude for drawing and math help? Yes, but not beyond a 7th or 8th grade level, at best.

Urban Sketch and Watercolor Technique 1

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15 Of The Dumbest Things You'd Ever Want To Know About Watercolor Technique...That Work Every Time

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This is the shortest, easiest to read blog post ever written about watercolor. The idea is to get you over the hump and painting within minutes. Why? Because you are a procrastinator and you know it (or you wouldn’t have started reading this article instead of painting yourself) So start reading and I want to see that paint fly. Ready, go.

WHY SHOULD I WATERCOLOR?

Because it’s a really cool thing to do, and its fun, and you’ll feel really good about yourself. Plus it helps you see the world around you and become one with the moment. And did I mention you’ll have a little painting to be proud of and keep for your grandkids?

A little painting to be proud of and keep for your grandkids

 WATERCOLOR IS A TOOL

Watercolor is a tool for seeing…and communicating…and other stuff, too. If you think of it as a tool, you are less likely to think of it as something precious and hard-to-do and any of the other excuses you’ve come up with before deciding this is the day to begin. On the other hand, if you do think of it as a tool you are more likely to lend it to a friend who will never return it, or leave it out in the rain at a friend’s house and get your dad all mad.

WHAT YOU NEED

You are going to need water, paint, a palette, a brush, and some paper. If you don’t have these already, go get them at an art store. What helps make this book so short is that I don’t tell you which brushes or colors or paper to get.

 Just kidding…see list below where I tell you what to get. The next couple of photos show you the set up I use when doing watercolor architectural renderings, just so you can see I'm not making up that I use this stuff.

Another little painting you could keep for your kids, come to think of it

Here's one example of how the palette and brushes described in this post might look in the real world. Notice the paper towel and strips of scrap paper used to test the color and opacity of the watercolors I mix before painting

• BRUSH: get a nice brush with a nice pointy tip and around a size 8.

• PAINTS: get a tube of cadmium yellow (T), yellow ochre, alizarin crimson (T), cadmium red, French ultramarine blue (T), Prussian blue, burnt umber, sepia, winsor violet, hooker’s green, and sap green.

• PAPER: Buy a small watercolor “block” which means a pad of watercolor paper that is sealed along the edges so the pad keeps the top sheet from warping. Get a small size for starters, say about 6 x 9”.

• PALETTE: Get something with enough little paint holding areas for the paints above, and with bigger, shallows areas for mixing the color you want.

COLOR THEORY

Color is simply…well…actually there have been a ton of longer books written about color. For our purposes, color is what you are trying to copy from life onto an empty, terrifying little piece of expensive paper, with no guarantee that you’ll ever show the result to anyone, using only some strange liquid in a tube, a little brush and some water.

BUT SERIOUSLY

One word: triad. Believe it or not, you are going to use the theory of the color wheel and the color triad to make your little paintings. The color wheel is easy: It consists of three primary colors (yellow, red and blue) spaced equally around a “wheel.” Next come the three secondary colors, located between the primary colors, and created by mixing the two primary colors on either side of them. In other words, red and blue make violet; red and yellow make orange; and yellow and blue make green. Never mind for now that you can’t get every green or every orange or every violet you’d like to get from mixing primaries. But the reason we call the primaries chosen in this book a “triad” is because they have become known over the years to artists as producing the nearest misses in trying to get all colors. They are particularly good at getting there, especially with the help of the few secondary colors we throw in to our shopping list in the previous chapter.

PALETTE

Once you understand the basics of the color wheel, it is helpful to have a plan for how to access these colors. I use the following approach to laying out my palette (see photo below, and photo of real-world palette above). Basically, I just distribute the colors in the order they appear on the wheel around my rectangular palette. The idea is to keep opposites across the palette from each other, and to keep your palette as clean as possible by having similar colors close to each other. That way any splashing that occurs as you mix colors won't overly-pollute the colors next to them.

MIXING COLORS

The best way to introduce the idea of mixing colors is to have you mix the ugliest color: gray. (We're going to mix abut 50 shades of it, so make sure you're in a safe place.) Why gray? Because gray is what you get when you mix opposites on the color wheel. Mixing gray will help both your understanding of the color wheel and your understanding of another concept: color temperature. What is color temperature? It's the degree of warmth or coolness found in a color, usually having to do with the amount of red or blue found in the color. But we get ahead of ourselves. Let's try mixing some grays.

In the examples below, I have you use four different pairs of colors generally thought of as "opposites across the color wheel" to create grays. For those of you who like lists (and who doesn't?), those color pairs are:

1. Burnt siena and Cobalt blue (known as a "sedimentious" pair for reasons I'll discuss elsewhere)

2. Yellow Ochre and Windsor violet

3. Cadmium red and Prussian blue (a dye-based or "stain" based pair, because of the extraordinary staining power of Prussian blue)

4. Burnt Umber and French ultramarine blue

Each of these pairs, when mixed with more or less of the warm color with respect to the cool color, is capable of producing a warmer or cooler gray. Each of these pairs also produces a subtly different gray which, with practice, you will come to know exactly when you want to use. To get started, create an arrangement that features each color in its own small area, then a larger area of the mixed gray between them, with the warm color more dominant on one side, and the cool color more dominant on the other. I chose the silly configuration below, but feel free to use any kind of shape you please. I'll be sure to note your design when I see it posted to your Pinterest page.

Seems simple, right? That's because we haven't done greens yet. Greens are a whole other ball of wax. I once heard someone say that green is the most difficult color to mix because everyone--whether they are an artist or not--knows the right green when they see it. That makes sense when you think about it, because we've all spent our lives in Nature, where Mother Nature reminds us each day that this green is for Maple leaves, this green is for grass, and so on and so forth. It just permeates our brains. But wake up one day and see the two greens switched and even a baby knows something is wrong. For that reason we will stay away from mixing greens.

Just kidding. Below is your exercise for beginning your life long struggle to mix the right greens. Its so complicated that I won't even try to describe it in words, although I have helpfully labelled each of the greens in the exercise below. Just imitate my exercise first, then bust out on your own. The important thing is: keep mixing greens all your life and you may--just may--get one right someday.

Thanks for getting this far. When I originally published this post I was using Squarespace 5, then Google began pushing people to use mobile-friendly Squarespace 7* and I switched over. During the transition some writing and images were lost, so I am rebuilding the original post as time permits. Stay tuned for updates, and thanks for reading this far. Here, in the meantime, are the remaining photos that accompanied the original post. 

If you have enjoyed this post so far, please support my efforts by following me on Instagram here, and subscribing to my Youtube channel here. I promise to keep you educated and entertained. If you have already done so, then you are awesome.

Architectural Rendering Techniques Your Mother Didn't Tell You About 2: Podcast

Used to be I did about 7 hours of public radio a day. Then something happened. (No, I didn't "get too bummed out." I mean, yes, I did, but that wasn't why I left.) I discovered blogs and realized it was a lot more useful to get my news curated by intelligent people (so long as the blogs were from moderates from both sides) than to wade through the NYT or WSJ every day (or feel guilty I wasn't).

But clicking back and forth between blogs in my browser got a little tiresome, too, so I went to Google Reader. (You aren't using Google Reader? Really? OMG, are you gonna love the time you save w/ Google Reader:-0.)

Anyway, Google Reader is great, but you gotta read it, and as any practictioner of architectural rendering techniques and waterolor techniques knows, you can't be reading stuff AND getting stuff done at the same time. The answer?

Podcasts. Which ones? Well, you gotta choose your own, but if you're like me and you have the following genes: artist, tech and wantrepreneur, then you're going to love these:

1. Leo Laporte's This Week In Google
2. Leo Laporte's This Week In Tech
3. Leo Laporte's Mac Break Weekly
4. Jason Calicanis' This Week In Start Ups (I'm gonna start you with Gary Vaynerchuck Interview)

Just start there and if you don't enjoy, let me know and I'll come up with some new ones. But trust me, you are gonna love these quirky people and learn a ton. Just go here and start downloading for free.

And after that? Audiobooks on audible.com

1. Free: The Future Of A Radical Price, by Chris Anderson
2. The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson
3. Social Betwork Business Plan, by David Silver

Listen to those and then we'll talk.

MA State Skiing Championships 2010, Wachusetts, MA

If you couldn't be there, here's a link to a photo or two of our team's view of the big event. Many thanks to Jen Summers and Lauren Broussal for a lot of hard work hosting the MMRHS part of the party. :)

I would have done an architectural rendering in watercolor of each skier but the water kept freezing!

Architectural Rendering Techniques Your Mother Didn't Tell You About

Chapter 14: The ROKU Box (The first in a series of slightly ireverent posts in which we discover tools to help all of us watercolorists--whether you do architectural renderings or more traditional subjects--stay a little more sane during all those hours in the studio.)

OK, you're a dedicated watercolor artist, you've got your favorite triad, your favorite brushes and paper--all good. But now, you've reached the seventh consecutive hour of NPR today and you need a break. You have Netflix Instant, but you don't want to spill water on your laptop keyboard. Solution? The Roku box. It's the little black box about the size of an old video tape that you've heard about but haven't tried yet, and it's gonna change your world. Roku works with your Netflix Instant queue, but it plugs right into your TV and streams your Netflix Instant selections directly from your wireless bridge or modem to your TV (as another video input similar to a DVD player connection). You turn on your Roku box, select Netflix Instant, and scroll through your awesome selections until one hits the mood (I'm on my fourth consecutive 30 Rock Season 3 episode as we speak.)

http://www.roku.com/

OK, so not every time is right for Roku, but if you're on deadline and you can spare just enough mental bandwidth to pay partial attention to, oh, I don't know: R. Crumb? or Mystery Science Theater 3000? Or My Architect? Or Room With A View? Or any of the other pure awesomeness that is your Netflix Instant queue, then I heartily suggest you make the Roku box part of your palette. Next week: green tea.

American Society Of Architectural Illustrators Members' Choice Awards

A fascinating look at the wide variety of techniques that architectural illustrators are using across the world.

Five Top Designers To Design Sheds For Berkshire Botanical

I'm helping my friends Maria Nation and Molly Boxer promote a great upcoming fundraising event at the Berkshire Botanical Garden.

Five top NYC & Berkshire-based designers are going to each design a garden shed, starting with the same standard prefab design and transforming it into something fantastic. At the end of the event the designs will be available for purchase. Its still early, so none of the designers has committed 100% to a design, but Maria and Molly thought it might be fun to get their members and newsletter readers thinking about sheds by asking "what kind of shed would you design if you could do (almost) anything?" I was recruited to provide a sketch of a design for their newsletter, but I convinced them (after several mimosas each) that it might be fun to expand the scope and help readers imagine what a typical designers' design process might be like. Since most designers I know start with "what's been done before," here's a link to about 40 great shed images available on the web, and a scribble of my own, below. I won't be (sniff) doing one this year (sniff, sniff) but I hope you enjoy anyway.

Party Like It's 1979!

Kickin it old school at the Archive. Where are they now? I was thinking to myself, OK, what do these happy people from innocent times at Kent State School of Architecture have to do with an architectural rendering website, then I remembered...wait, these people ARE my CLIENTS!!?? Sort of. Enjoy. Huge thanks--I think--to Chas (Kikel) for keeping these images. KSUers, don't forget to share comments at bottom.

Chillin' 70's style

Don Dennis and Chuck...nuff said.

The timeless stylings of Dave Boyce aka...I can't say it.

Sketching Barns for My Cool Friend Maria

I have the coolest friend named Maria. She has an amazing garden and amazing barns and amazing dogs and a cool truck and a pretty cool boyfriend, but mostly she's just a great person and a generous friend. She is always having someone over to cook for, and she makes the best food. If you get an invitation to Maria's, you should consider yourself lucky--you are definitely going to have a good time eating really good food and talking to smart and entertaining people. And you might get a little schnockered. This is her dog Dash. Actually it's Roberto's dog, but everyone assumes she told him what kind of dog to get so it would match her dogs better. And it does! It's amazing.

Anyway, I have to draw where to put her barn for her, so I'd better get going. But here's a sketch I did for her oven. It was eventually built, albeit in a different form, by Mark Mendel, who is an amazing mason and an amazing person whom I met at one of Maria's dinner parties, even though I already knew him. Mark knows a sh_tload about jazz, which is cool. And even though he probably winces when he hears people say it, who doesn't want to know how to build cool stone walls? Anyway, hope you enjoy it and stay tune here for lots more drawings of things for Maria. I like to do it and it makes me feel better about all the times I eat food at her house.

This is actually the wrong drawing because I can't find the one I did for her but hopefully she doesn't mind.

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(Author James Akers is a registered architect and illustrator with over 25 years experience. He provides both in-house and studio-based sketching, rendering, and what one might call "design stenography" services to many of NYC's and Boston’s leading architects.)