magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

Up early for work. The project is a proposal for a wall of graphical content (corporate history, environmental policy, community responsibility, &c.) for a company's headquarters in Texas. Regarding the space, all we had to go on was some rough dimensions, "The ceiling is high, about 35 feet. The main wall is 50 or 60 feet long. And maybe the room is about 30 feet deep." And some poorly shot construction photos.

So we came up with a few designs that dealt with the ungainly height of the space, made use of the full wall width, and created a sitting alcove across from it (asked for in the RFP). And spent the better part of the last few days working on elevations and renderings of these designs in the space as we knew it.

This evening, within nearly 12 hours of the proposal's deadline (the whole thing, as these often are when dealing with layers and layers above the design team, was to be done in a super-compressed timeframe), we received the architect's plans and elevations of the space.

Turns out that the room is more of a 30 foot cube. The ceiling is vaulted and has windows along the top. The 15 feet or so of the main wall on either side of the cube are actually in a hallway, 10 feet deep at most. The seating area is (as per the architect's drawings) already mapped out and way more traditional than empty white room we though we were dealing with.

I don't know where along the way between the building architects and the interior/environmental graphic design team the drawings got held up, but they're the sort of thing that you really could have used at the start of the design process, not when you're polishing up the renderings.

So, unless someone presenting the proposal (I won't be involved) can sell it conceptually as opposed to literally, and unless the group the proposal is being presented to are at least slightly creative thinkers, I don't think that we're going to get the job. But who knows? Actually finding a way of adapting the concept to the real and very different space would probably be a fun design challenge.