Presentation Advice

By Erik Illies

I’ll take this blog posting as an opportunity to share my tips for getting through final preparations for studio presentations. Of course these hindsight’s are specific to my point of view, but we’ve all been there before and share a lot of the same issues. If nothing else, this will serve as a talking point that will suffice as my blog posting submission requirement!
So here goes:

1. No amount of preparation will ever get your final product to the point of completion you expected or desired. Often times professor expectations are wildly inaccurate or will cause you to misinterpret what you need to have done and thus pre-emptively blame yourself for being a failure. Forget about this! Get done what you can and be proud of the insane amount of work you just got done! Don’t worry about what you couldn’t and didn’t do because it’s out of your hands at this point anyway.

2. Don’t hold yourself to perfection; this is school you’re supposed to make mistakes. If you will not make decisions and move forward unless your design is perfect, you may as well give up now. You will fail at perfection every time. Deal with it!

3. It works for me to keep a broad overall picture of everything I have to do and prioritize on the fly. This way I don’t become fixated on one task to the point of only completing one thing. This is a very common pit I’ve watched my fellow students (and admittedly myself fall into). Keep backing up and looking at everything you have to get done and work toward a consistent level of completion for all of them. This way you may not get everything done fully, but you will have at least gotten everything done!

4. Technically specific: when rendering in Revit; it is a good idea to set up a mock sheet of the board or panel you are going to pin up for final submission and arrange the views you will use from revit on it prior to exporting them to photoshop or illustrator. Primarily you will be able to judge scale early and make adjustments when it’s easy to do so. The other, and possibly most time saving, advantage is that you can edit the crop view size of any perspectives you plan to render to fit the mock up and final board.
a. Drag the perspective onto a sheet and activate it’s view.
b. Click on the crop region itself and open the “crop size” dialogue box in the upper toolbar.
i. In this dialogue box there is an option to keep the ratio proportions as they are, check this box.
c. Now you can change the height or width of the view to fit what you want on the final board.
d. And here is why you did all of that:
i. You don’t have to render these views at insane pixel definitions or quality settings. Normally people will boost the dpi up to ridiculous because they don’t want lose quality when they stretch the image (and I’m saying don’t stretch the image in the first place). Now you can render the view at 150-300(max) on high… still don’t believe me? Go look at my teams boards facing the hallway in the gallery. Not a single one was done above High and 150 dpi.

Enjoy!