– The Production Designer Playbook –
Everything you need to level up your Design, Rendering
and Production understanding, centralized in one course
Let’s level you up
Welcome to The Production Designer Playbook
The complete, zero-nonsense Concept Art guide
To understand the Production Pipeline, level up your Design and Rendering skills
And increase your value in the eyes of Studios
Everything you need, in the right order
Instead of hunting for 5435743 different YouTube videos, Gumroad tutorials, half-baked Reddit advice and old blog posts that all contradict each other…
We condensed everything you need to level up your Design, Rendering and Production understanding abilities, and we put it in the right order for you.
This is the full Design Process we follow with every single mentee in our Portfolio-Building Mentorship, which got some of them hired at:
And more
By the end of it,
you will know exactly how to
- Deliver what studios expect from a Concept Artist
- Positively stand out in today’s seemingly saturated market
- Understand fully how the Concept Art Industry works
- Create Concept Art that is valuable for the Production Pipeline and Studios, past the bluesky phase
- Nail every single step of the Design Process so Art Directors and Clients love you
- Get rid of the Blank Page Syndrome and develop drastically different ideas for any design task
- Level up your Rendering abilities
- Design with constraints, gameplay and entertainment value in mind
- Know how studios make money, and how to use that to skyrocket your hireability
This is what makes up for a valuable concept artist who fits studios’ expectations
Here is how artists improved with it
What is inside the Playbook?
Click on each part below to unfold it and see everything that is included.
In it we explain:
Today’s state of the industry
And how to navigate it successfully
What studios expect from a concept artist in 2026
And how to show it in your portfolio
The reality of the job
What concept art is and is not in today’s industry
The deal breakers
That get your portfolio rejected, and how to fix these
What makes a good concept artist
That studios hire
How to stand out positively
In that seemingly saturated market
This is where most aspiring concept artists, including a lot of pros, struggle.
There is way more to concept art than just a polished picture.
This is why, in this chapter, we break down the entire design process from start to finish:
This is why, in this chapter, we break down the entire design process from start to finish:
Brainstorming around the Brief
Extracting the right key elements, finding relevant and fresh ideas, and collecting the right references for it
Early sketches
How to explore drastically different proposals for your designs
Refining your work
How to pick the best designs and polish it properly
Helping the 3D team
How to create every single turnaround, props page and callout sheet the rest of the production team needs to turn your concept in 3D
The final render
How to push and render everything
Adding value to your work
How to overdeliver to studios
The goal is to ensure you know how to help every single person of the creative team in a studio with your concept, rather than just making flashy pictures that nobody can use in a studio.
Where most artists stay stuck for years,
and how to finally break through it, step by step
Improving design and rendering
For characters, environments, props, creatures, regardless if your work is realistic, stylized or anything in between
Storytelling
How to inject better storytelling in your work
Adding entertainment value
A complete breakdown of all the gameplay elements in game, why these matter, and how to use them to create better designs
What makes money
How to design junior-friendly elements that are monetizable by studios, so you make your work more appealing to them
Avoiding common mistakes
For Design, Rendering, and in your entire process
This is everything we wished we had learned in concept art school, that would have saved us years of rejections we couldn’t explain.
A set of 5 weeks of optional homework
to apply everything you’ve learnt so far, and craft a portfolio chapter way better than what you could before.
On top of the course, you will also get:
Private Community
Access to a private community reserved to the Playbook owners
Cheat-Sheets
That you can print, to unstuck your designs and avoid common pitfalls
Mentorship Discount
200€ of discount on any of our Mentorships, whether it’s The Ascent or our Flagship Portfolio-Building Mentorship, if eligible
5 Weeks of Feedback from our Mentors
During our next contest (we run 1 to 2 a year), the closest thing to the feedback loop of our Mentorship without joining it
Here is what our mentees have to say about it
You may wonder how much it costs
200 €
And you’ll also get 200€ of discount
on any of our Mentorships if you join one later
on any of our Mentorships if you join one later