21 August 2024
Judging the Drawing of the Year Award 2024
- News
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Hayes Davidson is one of the world’s leading visualisation studios. Collaborative to our core, we partner with the most respected and visionary architects, developers, planners and agencies, to create exceptional ways to help them communicate their ideas and ambitions.
Our purpose is to help our clients visualise a better world, translating great design concepts into beautiful and compelling images, films and visual experiences that engage, inspire, and influence. We explore all the possibilities inherent in a brief, guiding a visual strategy for every stage of a project’s life.
Creative in both ideas and outputs, we are unconstrained by a house style, drawing on our experience to offer the most appropriate visual responses for an individual brief. We are passionate about democratising the built environment and are constantly developing new tools and techniques to support greater participation, inclusive decision making and informed debate.
Hayes Davidson offers wraparound consultancy and visualisation outputs, working in partnership with our clients to advise, guide and deliver the most compelling visuals and narratives to communicate a project.
Across planning, marketing, architectural competitions and design development, we have diverse, expertise within our team, including in-house app developers and real-time rendering experts. We also offer specialist experience in the following:
Creative strategy. Our starting point for any project is asking 'What if...?’ We work collaboratively with clients and design teams to unpick assumptions and workshop fresh ideas to offer unique and innovative solutions and create memorable artwork.
Planning. Pioneers in verified images, we built the methodology that underpins today’s industry standard. We have continued to innovate, combining rigour, precision and accuracy with creativity and new technology. Our specialist planning team, dedicated to analysing the potential visual impact of new city development, has an exceptional track record in supporting major planning applications with view-scoping and early-stage option testing.
Film. As expert storytellers, we use film to create distinctive, experiential project narratives for clients and brands. Our in-house team provides holistic ‘concept to completion’ support from creative strategy to brief refinement, options and storyboarding, art direction and location shoots, and animatics.
Hayes Davidson is a pioneer in visualisation, widely acknowledged as one of the founding forces of our industry. Today, our ensemble team of creative specialists continues to embody our original values of creativity, innovation and fresh thinking established over 30 years ago by our founder and industry leader Alan Davidson.
Our experience, working with the most creative and ambitious clients on some of the world’s most ground-breaking and iconic projects, has given us an unrivalled body of knowledge on which to draw. From BIM to the Metaverse, from the Shard to the Highline, our work over the last 30 years has engaged with the big built environment issues of the day, shaping our understanding and helping define our futures.
As an employee-owned business, teamwork and collaboration are at the heart of everything we do. We actively nurture a studio culture that results in the quality, ingenuity and exceptional service that our clients value. In a supportive, ego-free environment, we are free to explore ideas and focus on the most appropriate and creative solutions for each and every project.
Our people comprise a unique collection of skills and specialisms which we curate, project-by-project, to ensure our clients have the best possible team working alongside them. With an international team and a physical presence on 3 continents, we have fully embraced the potential of remote and hybrid working to offer our clients enhanced flexibility and responsiveness.
Our strong founding values mean that we are committed to a supportive, friendly and inclusive culture, and to helping each and every member of our team reach their full individual potential. For us, a dynamic and collaborative studio is one in which everybody is encouraged to contribute and participate. We like to give something back and support a number of charitable initiatives including Article 25, Open City’s Architecture in Schools programme and HD5K, our annual run to support the work of MNDA. Many of our activities are generated and championed by our team.
As an equal opportunities employer, we are developing EDI initiatives at both studio and industry level to support professional access and training. We also run a paid summer placement programme for interns keen to get their first taste of working on live projects. We promote a good work/life balance and support flexible working.
Our continued success is driven by our passion for creative collaboration, and our desire to expand our networks to embrace new disciplines, new thinking and new approaches. If, like us, you are passionate about what you do and would like to explore the potential of working together, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact our Creative Director David Bullock.
We value the skills and commitment of our team and provide exciting opportunities for personal and professional development at all career stages. We are always on the lookout for fresh perspectives and the next generation of ideas. Please note, as part of our commitment to EDI, Hayes Davidson operates a name-blind recruitment process.
We are always on the lookout for talented freelancers. If you share our passion for great architecture, art and technology, please send your CV and portfolio to hdrecruitment@hayesdavidson.com.
15 July 2024
Hayes Davidson is passionate about inclusivity and ensuring that wherever possible we help contribute to a more equitable and democratic conversation around the built environment.
We want to use our influence within our industry to encourage people to do better. In that spirit, we have developed a diversity database to ensure that our images of future developments accurately represent the people who will live and work in the places we visualise.
The idea for the database originated in 2020 and was part of our collective response to the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement. Like many creative studios, we came together as a workforce to talk about what we could do that would be meaningful for our industry and the work we are engaged in. We had some passionate and productive conversations – one of which was about representation.
Realising that the representation of diversity within our image database was inadequate, we set about rectifying that. First, we needed the data which would help overcome individual artists’ assumptions or biases. Using open-source census records, we created a demographic database for each and every London borough that worked as a reference point and gave us information on age, ethnicity, gender and disability, against which we could check the accuracy of our images. Next, we began to work with our photographers to improve our visual assets and ensure that we had access to a diverse and representative set of images of people and communities, tagging these in a way that meant they were readily accessible for our artists. Finally, we have created a diversity checklist which, combined with the unconscious bias training that we have offered our teams, means they can ensure that clothing, actions, placement and any cultural sensitives are all considered when creating the final images.
We’ve used the demographic database to support recent projects including Camden Highline and Doon Street where community engagement and consultation have been critical to the development of these schemes and in ensuring their long-term success. At Doon Street, we also organised a community filming day with local residents of various ages, abilities and ethnicities to animate a fly-through of the new scheme and facilities.
We are now extending the database to include other regions and countries that we work in, and looking within the coming year to make our database open-source to help boost our industry’s progress in creating inclusive visual assets.