Art preproduction

Once you decide on your app’s art direction focus, it’s a good idea to begin preproduction of art assets. This planning sets the foundation for the look and feel of your app’s visuals. By iterating through these stages, you can refine ideas, ensure consistency, and create cohesive and engaging art for your app. Key benefits include:

Brainstorming is the initial stage of the creative process. This is where ideas are generated and visual inspiration is gathered to define the overall look of the app. The brainstorming process can be aided by vision boarding, which is a method that involves collecting images, colors, and themes that resonate with the intended experience. It encourages team members to contribute ideas, ensuring a diverse range of concepts. This stage helps the team align on a shared vision and sparks creativity.

Use tools like Milanote, PureRef, Photoshop or Pinterest to compile a digital collage that clearly communicates the app’s artistic vision. Generative AI tools can significantly accelerate vision boarding by suggesting design elements, generating concept art variations, and organizing references based on descriptive prompts. Generative AI tools, like Meta AI⁠, are a great resource.

Concept art is the first visual representation of an application’s art style. It turns brainstorming ideas and vision board themes into sketches for characters, environments, objects, props, and UI/UX elements. It often shows many iterations of the same concept. In designing for the Meta Quest and other supported devices, artists must consider spatial ergonomics, interaction comfort, and scale perception. This ensures objects are well-proportioned and easy to interact with at different distances. Unlike traditional games or apps, immersive apps exist in a 3D world. This requires multiple perspectives of objects and environments to show how they’ll appear from various angles.

Additionally, effective UI concept art should design intuitive interfaces, such as panels, and interaction cues that feel natural in an immersive space. For more information, see Intro to Immersive Design.

Visual targets are specific benchmarks or goals for the visual quality of a project. They are important for artists and 3D modelers since they provide a reference point for the desired look and feel of the final product. Visual targets guide the art and design teams in achieving a consistent visual quality throughout the development process. Establishing visual targets early in the development process can prevent unnecessary revisions and ensure a consistent visual experience. Additionally, visual targets can help developers understand the limitations and capabilities of the hardware, allowing them to optimize their art assets for performance while maintaining high visual quality.

The process begins with selecting a small but important scene, character, or object to develop at near-final quality. Once visual targets are finalized, they serve as guidelines for 3D asset production, ensuring all future assets meet the app’s technical requirements.

A style guide is a document that communicates the visual and design standards to digital artists and teams. It ensures consistency across all visual elements of the app. A style guide includes details on color schemes, typography, iconography, and other design elements as well as the concept art and visual targets. It serves as a documented reference and source of truth for artists and developers, helping them maintain a cohesive look and feel throughout the app.

Note: Style guides serve as a living document that can be changed as the aesthetics are iterated on during the process.

The details and requirements of your app’s style guide can vary depending on the needs of your project. Below are some examples of sections and information for you to consider when creating your own style guide:

A vertical slice is a fully playable and polished section of the app, acting as a proof of concept before full-scale production. In Meta Quest app development, a vertical slice allows developers to test and refine the app’s final visuals as well as its core mechanics and user experience. You should select a key scene, environment, or level, and implement final assets, lighting, shaders, and UI elements at production quality. Then test on the target hardware focusing on comfort, usability, and optimization. This will help give you a clear picture of how the final product will look and function, helping to identify any issues early in the development process.

Note: The vertical slice can also serve as a pitch tool for interested partners, your target audience, and potential investors by showcasing a quality benchmark for the full project.