This is pretty neat. OpenBrand, the UK/Czech startup that provides a ‘Dropbox for designers‘ and an online space for brands and agencies to manage brand-related design assets, has added the ability to generate “Live Comps.” What is a comp? Well, in this context, it’s referring to a composition that shows what a design will look like in the real world.
So, for example, rather than a designer simply sending a client a print-ready design for a business card, a comp could show what that business card will look like in somebody’s hand or as a pile of cards scattered across a table. The idea is to give some notion of scale — and to add a bit of photo-realistic glamour to a design. After all, designers are in the business of selling ideas, too.
However, manually creating these types of comps, depending on their complexity, can be quite time-consuming, and as a result it’s sometimes reserved for only the most important clients. That’s the problem that OpenBrand’s Live Comps feature sets out to solve.
Live Comps support is fairly extensive and includes anything from prints, business cards, billboards, mobile apps and websites, to more complex shapes such as car wraps, product packaging, or a t-shirt as worn by a model.
The feature is available for both OpenBrand’s free Dropbox-esque delivery service and its more comprehensive and paid-for offering that helps designers, agencies and brands collaborate, store and share digital assets.
Interestingly, OpenBrand originally planned to use a third-party rendering engine to offer Live Comps, but ended up building out its own technology. The results of which CEO Mirek Burkon says “are much better and possibilities crazier.” And I have to say the feature does look pretty snazzy.