Minimalist furniture presentation: how we focus on the essentials at Danthree Studio
How do you manage to present furniture and interiors in such a way that the products establish a relationship with their surroundings, tell their story, become tangible - and yet the focus remains clearly on a single product?
Product images in the field of furniture and interiors often mean that a brand room is furnished with many details. Completely furnished rooms are shown, which are supposed to be experienced by depicting everyday clutter, numerous accessories and many little things. But what can really be experienced? Is it the rooms themselves? Or is it a single product? Can people really concentrate on a single piece of furniture when they see such a "naturally furnished" room?
At Danthree Studio, we have found that this is difficult. People tend to think of complex product images as interior design advice rather than product images. The focus gets lost. Our approach to creating 3D furniture renderings is to reduce the visual information so that a focus on the essentials is possible. In doing so, we are guided by the principles of minimalism.
What does minimalism mean in the visual marketing world and how do we implement it?
Minimalism in art means a reduction to schematic clarity and to logic. Works of art such as the concrete sculpture "Untitled" by Donald Judd (1991, Israel Museum, Jerusalem) show a high degree of objectivity and are impersonal. We bring these principles through a focus on the basic geometric structures and incorporate the strong spatial expressiveness from the minimalism of architecture. This language of shapes and colors translates well as 3D visualization. Simple, almost boring appearing rooms are equipped with few furnishings. The CGI furniture stands in a context, communicates with each other. They tell a story - and this gives these reduced rooms tension.
This is not a new approach, we at Danthree Studio did not invent minimalism in visual marketing. Conventional product photography has many years of experience in this field. If you see a product on a white background, a photo light box was probably used. That's a white box, lit without shadows, that makes the product appear to float more or less incoherently (cropped product images). Often this is understood as minimalism: the reduction to the product itself. But our CGI artists at Danthree Studios take a different approach. Because, as Steve Johnson once explained, "Minimalism in photography is not about getting less in a photo. Rather, it's about showing the essence of something.
That's the approach we take at Danthree Studios with pared-down branded spaces that we spar with furniture. Everything is created as a 3D rendering, so the details of the products and spaces are easy to rework at any time.
