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Ikea Communications runs the largest photo studio in northern Europe. Inside their 94,000-square-foot facility an army of carpenters, designers and shooters all plan, build and photograph the faux rooms you see in the Ikea catalog. Here's a brief look at their facility:
Fake rooms still require real skilled labor to produce. The walls need to be painted, the kitchens need to be tiled, the living rooms need to be styled. It's a lot of work, and when the catalog's finished, the rooms get torn down to make way for next year's.
It's therefore no surprise that Ikea is using more and more digital images in their catalog, like the ones you see here. (That's right, none of these are real.) Yet when I first heard this fact during a presentation at Autodesk headquarters, where a company flack mentioned Ikea uses their software to create the images, all of us journalists in the room snatched up our phones to Tweet this.
No one can tell the difference between the studio shots and the CG ones, so it makes sense to save on all of the building materials required for the former by shifting focus towards the latter. Currently just 12% of the Ikea catalog consists of digital images, though they're ramping that up to 25% for the next catalog.
You might wonder why the percentage is so low, considering that Ikea undoubtedly has CAD files of everything they produce. Surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal reports that "Faced with a shortage of people capable of doing this work, the company is collaborating with photo schools to teach computer design skills."
Nuts, huh? A bunch of you reading this are probably already qualified, so I'm kind of surprised Ikea has to go down to the school level to institute training.
Ikea flacks, if you're reading this: You need to get onto Coroflot!
Comments
My guess is that designers would be over-qualified in that kind of position, since it's really just photography with CG.
Actually, I'd say the opposite. Alot of my peers don't have the technical knowledge of how to produce images like this. Experience counts when generating images of this nature.
If you were talking about IDers using hypershot (or one of the other point and shoot renderers) then yes, probably over qualified.
Jake, since CG imagery is only part of our trade, designers may be called over-qualified. However, that would negate the skill involved in this grade of photography, for which I would venture that the majority of designers are underqualified.
Turn the tables and try imagining a professional photographer saying, "it's just design, really. Piece of cake."
No one else sees a problem in a company the size of IKEA not being able to find workers to do the manual labor required to create a photo set?
Pretty soon everyone will want to sit behind a computer day in and day out...who will swing the hammers then?
I have been doing this type of work for over a year now. There is a huge push from the manufacturers to save money and moving to CG is one option. The real savings comes in on those small changes that arent realized until after the photoshoot. If you need to change a wall color, studios would have to refabricate the room which costs a lot of money and time. I can have everything finished up for them in a few hours at a minimal cost
Even though I am a traditionally an ID'ed, I still consider myself under qualified to do some of this stuff. Just because I can carry a product from research to ideation/sketching to CAD does not mean I can do what some of these guys do. The lighting, materials and post processing is something that takes a lot of time and practice, much like anything else. I would never lower my praise for Bertrand Benoit just becasue he isnt an ID'er.
I work for a company that uses photo-real rendering instead of photography for almost all of our product photos. We do it because it is much cheaper and faster than making high-quality product models and photographing them.
You are right that this isn't a job for industrial designers - we'd rather have our designers doing great product design than spending all their time making renders. We use a dedicated rendering studio instead.
The problem is that the people doing the rendering are usually trained in rendering, not photography. Therefore they lack the real-world lighting skills of an experienced product photographer. Ideally, we need people with the trained eye of an experienced product photographer, but the in-depth software skills of an experienced renderer.
I guess this is why Ikea is hitting the schools to find (or create) the kind of talent they need!