Storyboarding in Architecture
Hey guys! It’s Linda here, and we’re back after our crit lead-up with a new post on something that was requested in the last couple of weeks: storyboarding.
As much as architecture is a subject of visuals and graphics, it’s also one of storytelling. It’s so important to consider narratives throughout your work as an architecture student. From the way you present your projects at pin-ups and crits, to the overall journey you curate throughout your portfolios that you submit for university, being conscious of how your work flows can help solidify your projects, make them more memorable and easy to follow.
One method I use when planning out my presentations is storyboarding. This allows you to organise an overview of your work and experiment with narrating the development of your projects and proposals. There are different ways to go about doing this that I’ll list down below:
Sketching Out your Pages
Essentially, this is like a pictorial form of bullet pointing. You can use a template or draw out your pages in a thumbnail format, and use simple shapes to represent the different elements on those pages. This is a good way to test if you have too much on one page of your presentation. If you’re struggling to condense it down into a few simple lines or shapes, you run the risk of spending too long presenting a slide that may be confusing, or your audience will get bored of you before you get through all your points. It can also leave your panel confused on where to look at as you present. Aim to create a hierarchy in your format so you project to the audience which images/drawings you want them to focus on as you speak. You can annotate each thumbnail sketch with the few points you want to make for that part of the presentation, then move on to the next.
Alternatively, you could use a grid template and fill it in with a potential layout, and reuse it if you need to make changes.
Printing out your presentation slides and rearranging them
This method is less time consuming and allows you to quickly physically rearrange the order of your presentation, playing around with the layout more freely. However, it doesn’t give you as much flexibility to change around elements on each page if you realise that you need to switch some content around to make your work flow better. Nevertheless, it can be a fun way to work with what you already have and see the best way to present your proposal as you have it down.
Digital Tools
Whilst analogue methods might be fun and experimental, some people may feel like digital tools can help them work more efficiently. This is especially the case during remote studying, where centralising your workflow to digital means can make it easier to adapt your work across different programmes.
There are two main softwares that help me out with digital storyboarding. Naturally, I consider my presentation flow when I use InDesign to make my pages, as I can quickly both shift around content on each page as well as the pages themselves. Using the document and spreading shuffle features to your advantage can help divide your presentation into parts, organising the information clearly and establishing a good narrative that’s easy to follow.
Recently, since I’ve been doing group work this year, Miro has also become a useful tool to collaborate with my group members and prepare our work to present together in one place. We can all access our ‘boards’ and make changes, meaning we can have live discussions over call and organise our work together at the same time. Specifically, we had a session where we uploaded all our presentation content and organised it in the order that we wanted to discuss, deciding what flows better with which section.
Working with a Narrative in mind
Whilst crits and submissions are one-off occurrences, storytelling early on and building a narrative from the early stages of your proposal can help you progress your design more meaningfully as well as present it cohesively at the end of the project. From your user and site analysis, to the development of your concept and beyond, working with a narrative can help you make meaningful designs that respond to the issues you’re tackling. For instance, the way that you portray your user’s needs and client profile early on in your research phase will impact your design decisions further down the line. These links will thread your work together and make it coherent rather than come off as isolated pieces of information that you did just to fulfil requirements. It gives your next steps a purpose when designing, and this will come through in your crit or presentation.
With that being said, the way that you tell these stories will differ depending on what you storyboard for. For that reason, I’ll go over what to keep in mind for a crit or presentation, how to do so for a portfolio and how the two differ.
Crits and Presentations
In general, you want to engage your audience with short, snappy points and switch to the next page quickly enough to keep them interested, but long enough for them to take in and process information through a balance between what you’re saying and referring to the visuals you present. This means you might have more pages with less but bolder and clearer content than you would for a portfolio. You don’t want blocks of text that people won’t have time to read - you’re talking for a reason.
However, you still need to make sure you stick to any time limits you might have, so prioritising what you want to present is also important when storyboarding. You might find that you have to keep certain analyses concise and development ideas that didn’t materialise to a bare minimum, if mentioned at all.
Since you’re trying to sell a particular idea and convince critics that you have a strong design rather than show how much hard work you’ve done (which we all want to be recognised for), it can make you more likely to go off on a tangent about something that makes your audience lose focus on the actual proposal. Stick to justifying your final ideas as much as you can so your feedback is focused on your latest developments.
Portfolios
For submission portfolios in particular, it’s more about letting the page do the talking for your work. Whilst people might have more time to read captions, some tutors or examiners might not have time to read every single thing you wrote which is why compelling graphics are always stressed in architecture.
Since portfolios have more of an opportunity to be ‘read’ compared to a verbal presentation, you can put more information on one page, especially if you have page limits which means you have to condense your content over a smaller spread of pages. In this case, the narrative of each page becomes just as important to consider as how everything comes together as a whole.
You can divide your narrative more concretely into sections: e.g. analysis, concept, design development etc. as you try to organise your work for marking. However, you still need to make sure the work is coherent and whoever is looking through your portfolio can understand why your process took a certain turn throughout the project.
If you find that you have some pages or content that are isolated or don’t really link with the surrounding work, you might find it better to take it out so as not to disrupt the flow of the narrative. You want to be convincing with your ideas, so don’t bring in random ideas or research that don’t carry through your design.
That’s it from me this week guys! Hopefully this requested post helped out a number of you to consider the way you organise your work for crits, presentations and portfolio submissions.
If you have any questions or post requests like this one, feel free to DM us at @archidabble on Instagram, or get in contact with us through our email at dabbleenquiries@gmail.com
See you next week for another blog post!
