• • Tips and Guides
  • Writing
  • Drawing
  • Clients
  • Contact!

Design Goals

Design and construction projects proceed more efficiently, affordably, and happily when the design team is selected based on well-defined design goals. We help owners and developers translate business and institutional aspirations into such goals. Then, through traditional qualification and proposal processes or through design competitions, we help select design teams that can best realize them.

While I typically work on an hourly basis, I offer frequently-requested service packages for a fixed fee. Examples of such packages include:

Design Differentiation

Architecture firms often have a good handle on how they are differentiated in the marketplace by expertise in project types or scales of project; it is less common for firms to be able to state clearly the distinguishing qualities of the work itself. For a very few firms, distinctions are obvious—the white, enameled metal panels of Richard Meier or the swooping metal forms of Frank Gehry—but, for most firms, articulating meaningful, concrete distinctions requires guided introspection. A typical four-session process might include:

Session 1, in which I learn your goals and map the realm of your work (geographic reach, project type, scale, outside advocates, competition).
Session 2, in which I visit, with you, one or more of your projects.
Session 3, in which I review, with you, a pin-up or other presentation of representative work.
Session 4, “Sketching Toward Writing,” in which I introduce a process of capturing written language through thumbnail sketching, working with selected members of your firm to elicit insights into the patterns that shape your work.

At the conclusion of this process, I provide a primer of the distinguishing characteristics of your firm’s work, to help guide your marketing and communications efforts, and a comparison of these characteristics with those of your principal competitors.

Presentation Materials Assessment

A firm’s marketing and presentation materials are easily compromised by any of several common problems, particularly insufficient concreteness and weak correspondence between text and image. It is often useful to have an outside set of eyes make a comprehensive assessment of your materials. Once problems are identified, the solutions are usually simple to implement, as well as to make a regular part of your future practice.

The process is straightforward: a critical review of your brochures, proposals & qualifications, presentation boards, slide shows, mailers, and so on.

Based on this review, I will provide a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of your materials; concise, easily understood guidelines for improvement; and basic staff training.

Image Bank Assessment

It is not unusual to discover that a firm’s image bank does not adequately capture the most significant, distinguishing characteristics of the work. It is not unusual, either, to find that, with recent and ongoing changes in technology, images are saved in a variety of formats, scattered in various places.

Through on-site review of your image bank, I can help you correlate the distinguishing characteristics of your firm’s work with contents of your image bank; recommend and develop a schedule for supplemental images (photography and drawings) for existing projects; provide consistent guidelines for future project documentation; and recommend organizational guidelines for your image bank.

My hourly rate for consulting to design firms varies with client firm size, corresponding to the average billing rate for firm principals published in Management Design’s 2007 Survey for California Architectural Firms:

1 to 5 person firm: $150/hour;

6 to 15 person firm: $175/hour;

16 to 90 person firm: $200/hour; and

91 person or larger firm: $225/hour.

My editorial assistant’s hourly rate is $100/hour.