What does a head of visualization actually do? Pearlfisher’s Justin Goode explains
As we continue our series demystifying the ad industry’s many job titles and appellations, Pearlfisher’s Justin Goode explains his gig as the design agency’s head of visualization.
/ Pearlfisher
Visualization is a term I’ve struggled with over the years. Initially, I just did 3D renders – beauty shots – of bottles. For the longest time, I was competing with photographers doing straight-up shots of Smirnoff. As a freelancer, that’s how I got my name.
I started in 2006-07. Back then, it was still called computer graphics, or CG. When you talk about visualization in other industries, such as architecture, it means rendering images or data visualization, so taking data points and putting them into graphs. Whenever I talk about the CGI aspect of it, I always try to relate it to movies. We do the same thing, just differently, at least from the CGI aspect of it – it is wireframes and Pixar and Jurassic Park, just a different application.
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When the design industry started using this term, I didn’t like it. But, as it has evolved, it has turned into doing everything from CGI to photography to retouching motion, motion graphics and the kinds of things that a production house might do.
Sometimes, that means doing mock-ups for presentations or rendering a bottle for a designer so that they can show the client what their work will look like in situ. We might do a render for some packaging or animate a logo to be used on the end card of a TV commercial, and we’ve animated full commercials before.
We’ll work with Pearlfisher’s Realisation, our production team, to make sure that the assets we make are to spec for what the client needs and are ready to print.
We’re now up to five people. It’s a small group but pretty robust. We’ve structured our team as a focused, small-scale, in-house production team. Instead of being jacks-of-all-trades, we’ve got people in here with different specialties. If you need ultra-realistic bottle renders, I’ll work on that. We have other 3D designers who specialize in creative characters. We have a guy that does retouching and, recently, we started doing in-house photography.
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I spend my days figuring out how to push our capabilities and our techniques, to expand what we’re doing and what we can talk to clients about. Inevitably, there’s a lot of scheduling; I work with our resourcing manager to find more boots on the ground for our team.
It’s a struggle sometimes not to get involved in projects. But on the other hand, I’ve been doing that forever. And I find a lot of lot of joy in trying to help my teammates grow and improve and not just sit there cranking out work all day.
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Originally, we didn’t have a ‘head’ title. I came in originally as a freelancer and then came as a director with the kinds of the intention of moving into a head title. A head of visualization and a robust visualization department isn’t standard at design agencies in our boutique size, it’s more typical of ad agencies or production houses.
Hamish [chief creative officer] and I figured out together a little bit about what visualization would be and what it could grow into beyond the basic stuff that agencies have traditionally done in this space. We’re fairly hands-off. He has a vision of what he wants me to do, but that’s why you hire people.
This craft has been underutilized in this industry, but he had the understanding and the vision to see the potential of it.