Custom designs are challenging for any business. Starting from ground zero is always difficult, and the creative process between PAVERART and our customers can take on a life of their own. We sometimes think to ourselves: "Geez, we have 500+ designs, isn't that enough!"
The world of custom design however leaves us little choice as our business name merges two basic words:
PAVER
+
ART
We turn Pavers into Art. Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And when our design collection falls short of pleasing our clients, we put our creative hats on along with all of our capabilities. Sometimes, we even need to invent NEW capabilities.
What do we work with?
Lots of colors (25+).
* From Pink to Purple, we have the colors needed to turn pavers into ART.
Crazy Cutting.
* You simply can't pull this off in a backyard.
Design visualization.
* What is it that you will actually be buying? How much imagination is needed?
Patience. Lots of patience.
* As Forest Gump would say: "That's all I have to say about that!"
Most important? The client's desire and vision, no matter how fuzzy.
* It doesn't hurt to ask. The only crazy vision is the one that is not pursued. Your house is just that, YOURS! Make it stand out with your own artistic touch.
Bringing a customer's vision vision into focus is often challenging, and sometimes a journey, so we go back and forth multiple times.
Here's a little example....
"The Butterfly Floral Design" Case Study
All projects start with a general idea as our residential web page showcases 9 different paver design collection categories to get the creative juices flowing. We often walk through our collection with the client, get a feel for what resonates, what doesn't. It's a starting point in the design process.
* This project focused on floral and butterfly design elements, but not in our classic circle design, but a circle built within a square "picture frame." We have multiple designs in our Nature Collection of inlays and started with this Color Rendering.
* The above color rendering prompted a very good question:
"This isn't what the pavers will actually look like right......isn't this much brighter than the real world?"
Of course the answer WAS "correct, it's the computer's version of the colors, it can't do blends and yes, pavers look different in the real world." While true, that answer doesn't really help our client visualize what her design will actually look like, clearly an area for us to get better for our clients.
Challenging questions are often the "igniter" to get better......we posted about this topic in August: Summertime: Improving Key Capabilities at PAVERART.
After solving the "will it really look like this question" by populating designs with our real custom colored pavers, we started to get closer.
* How about less flowers, different butterfly versions?
* Another challenging question:
Can we do something with the corners, looks like dead space, what kind of design element can be added?
At PAVERART, we have 2 major design principles we try and always up-hold:
1) Build designs that have a WOW factor!
2) Build designs that are BUILT TO LAST!
Concrete Pavers are incredibly durable and will often out-live us as humans! HOWEVER, if you start cutting too thin, like any material, you run the risk of it breaking. After 17.5 years of manufacturing Paver Designs, we know exactly what too thin is. More detail in very small spaces, you start to enter a danger zone, so sizing + design creativity is absolutely critical.
Nonetheless, after a session with the client reviewing a handful of images, we came up with the following design, which the client was happy with and so are we! It filled out the corners, adding great interest to the artwork and we are MORE than comfortable it is built to last.
That's what we love, when the client is happy and our 2 design principles are true: Wow Factor + Built to Last.
Final Design Rendering: Custom Floral & Butterfly Design
Real World Results
Photo Shoot: 10/13/20
The Video Shoot: Videos often give you a different perspective vs still photos of our designs.
And if you love cleaning videos, check this out. Note: The leaves are actually Autumn Blend in this cleaning video, final design (above picture) are actually red (we made 2 versions).
UPDATE 7/7/21
We absolutely love when our clients send us their installed photos. This project looks even better installed......actually they all look better in their final home!
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