news & views

Small is Beautiful

admin — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:53:21 +0000

Curve Design operates like an intelligent amoeba. At our heart is a small team of highly experienced brand designers, developers & strategists, that stay closely focussed on all our projects.
The experience contained at heart draws on many years of developing brands all over the world in virtually all consumer goods categories.
The design industry is hugely complex in the way it can be divided into many specialist areas requiring specialist skills. No design agency can employ permanent staff covering all of these skill areas so we don’t try. Instead we rely on our excellent network, giving us the option to pull in the best and most experienced talent to join us on projects where specialist skills are needed.
In that way, both we and our clients benefit from perfectly tuned design teams, designed to perfectly suit any given project.
This naturally creates opportunities to really make the full benefit of our presence felt. Through developing an understanding of our clients business, we may suggest other areas within their operation that may benefit from specialist consultancy/design input – from brand communication or operational & cost efficiency to environmental improvements.
Even given this flexibility, we never over-stretch. We only ever take on projects which can receive our full & intimate attention.

Structural Design doesn’t mean high project cost

admin — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:45:56 +0000

Project cost means the overall cost including tooling and production line change parts. Ultimately, the total cost to implement.

One of the first things we like to do is survey our client’s production operations. By understanding systems and machine specifications a picture builds on how much flexibility currently exists, often a lot more than expected.

We develop an understanding about the consequences of change. “If you do this, we can wind in the adjustments, if you do that we need a new machine”.

We often spot things that create bottlenecks in efficiency or are just bad utilization of machine capacity.

As a result of the research, we can back up design concepts with production rationale and indicative production costs.

marker visuals before CAD

admin — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:14:25 +0000

There is no beating the freshness and spontaneity of marker drawn conceptual visuals.

It works particularly well with structural work where detail can fog direction too early.

One of the problems with rendering concepts in high definition is it becomes too easy to start concentrating on image detail and forget the big picture.

Structural design usually has much higher cost implications associated with basic practicalities. Time is much better spent considering these practicalities and the associated costs for each concept, than whether a straight line would look better or how big corner rads should be.

At the concept stage the objective is to assess the fundamental direction a concept is taking and whether is is practical rather than appraising the beauty of the visual itself.