Estimated reading time: 5 min
Finding your creative process
One of the easiest traps to fall into as an architecture firm when it comes to your company blog is keeping your posts exclusively about your news and updates. The main feature that separates good architecture blogs from great ones is in the ability to engage readers with architecture in a broader sense. There are plenty of topics that you can write about, and the joy of blogging for an architecture firm is that you are not confined to one type of article. You have the freedom to explore topics, ideas and formats. In this article, you will find a few suggestions to help you kickstart or reinvigorate your architecture blog.
Pick a style and offer your opinions:
Are you a die-hard brutalism fan? Do you think postmodernism is overrated? Is Art Nouveau classy or trashy? Opinion pieces are a great opportunity to give a broader view of the architecture industry and explore the history of a particular style. These pieces can be more educational, discussing the facts and figures or dates and people who developed the style, or they can be more speculative, based on the thoughts and feelings that the style invokes.
Regional architecture:
Although many architecture firms now operate on a global scale, there are still distinctive regional aesthetics and techniques that make an area architecturally unique. Is there a country or region that really stands out to you architecturally? Perhaps you are fascinated by Barcelona’s contemporary architecture, or maybe you want to look more broadly at the architecture movements across the African continent? This type of blog can be as specific or wide-reaching as you want as you can determine the time-frames, geography, styles or even specific architects you want to discuss in the article.
Interviews with architects:
A fantastic way to get to know an architecture firm is through its architects. This is a brilliant way to make sure that your firm’s architects get a chance to be in the spotlight, and a much more interesting way to learn about the architecture industry. Some good starting questions include:
- What is your design ethos?
- Who inspires you?
- What is the most significant change you’ve witnessed in the industry since you became an architect?
- What is the best piece of advice you ever received?
- What are you looking forward to in the next year?
Respond to current industry trends:
Accessibility, wellbeing, technology and sustainability are the buzzwords of the industry right now. Write up an article about why these trends are important or use it as an opportunity to showcase your firm’s projects that embody these concepts. There are numerous angles that you can take with this sort of article and because the industry is always changing, there are always new or emerging trends that you can include.
Go in-depth on a specific architectural discipline:
Has your architecture practice worked on a number of hotel refurbishment projects recently, or found that fast-track construction is becoming increasingly popular. This is a fantastic opportunity to share what these ideas really entail with your clients. These are terms that are often thrown around but people might not know what this really means for architects and designers.
Write a Year-in-review:
Go back over the most exciting and interesting news from your firm from the last 12 months! This doesn’t just need to be updated on new projects, but also awards and other internal news including how old, completed developments are being used by their communities.
Offer up some fun facts:
Give us some little known facts about your well-known projects, or even about your firm as a whole. One of the benefits of these articles is that they can be short and sweet so do not take too long to write. We recommend adding some fun info-graphics for these sorts of articles to make it more visually engaging too!
Student-Focus articles:
Create a diary-style blog to share what the day-to-day life of an architect looks like. These sorts of articles are brilliant to market to student architects who are beginning to consider firms to apply to. Student architects are often a well-engaged audience, so don’t forget to direct some of your blog posts towards them. These could include blogs detailing what they might expect from their first architecture job, or advice for job interviews.
Reassess old blog posts:
Go through your blog archive and pick out an article. What has changed since the post was written and how/why has it changed? Is it new data, new technology, a change of heart? These sorts of posts are fantastic for tracking changes to the architecture industry in real-time.
Time To Get Writing
Once you have picked out the topic for your blog it is time to get writing! We suggest following a few rules to make your blog stand out!
- Include original images and graphics to break up the text and make the article a multimedia experience
- Do your research! Others are always going to have written about similar topics, so learn from their attempts! Even if you don’t necessarily end up using the research directly, it is much easier to write about a topic when you have a better understanding of how it fits into a broader narrative.
- Proof-read once, twice and then a third time for luck. Reading your work aloud will help you work out which phrases aren’t flowing. Change the font or add a background colour. This will make it easier to spot mistakes as you can easily glance over typos in a text that you’ve been working on for several hours. It is also a good idea to get someone else to read through your work as they will approach it with a fresh perspective and might find issues that you don’t see.
Now you are ready to go!