What Is Visual Development?

Visual development is a very important part of creating an animation, game and other types of visual entertainment. Also called concept art, it is a key starting point to get the look and the feel of the product. Someone who works in vis dev will work closely with other departments such as Production design, Art Direction and others to take ideas further to finished production ready pieces. Visual development helps a lot when it comes to world building, something that I really love the sound of. Backgrounds, props, characters, colours and lighting are all an important part of building up this world into something enjoyable, different but still relatable.

Depending on the industry in particular that you are talking about and who you ask, visual development can refer to different things. Using the term 'concept art' often makes people think of a fully rendered, beautifully painted piece of art that accurately shows the final idea of what the piece of media is going to look like. This is not what, by most professionals, is called concept art. A quote that I think explains it really well from here is that "the final audience is never going to see a piece of concept art. They are only going to see the result of the communication between the concept art and the development team". The point of concept art is to generate ideas and create the world and things inside it for the project. This is why I am picky with a lot of art books - some are almost exclusively this 'concept art' that shows nothing of ideas, just painted scenes of what I can already see in the game/animation etc. I like to see initial designs, how they evolved and what might nearly have been chosen to work with instead. I feel like understanding what has informed the ideas and what alternatives were thought about helps you to understand the fictional world even more, and to me that is much more exciting than a pretty painting.

The games Mass Effect, Bioshock Infinite and Borderlands are some of my favorites when it comes to visual development/concept art; it is very clear where they came from and where they are going throughout their designs, and it's great to see what could have been.