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A hearing room is not a gallery. The lights stay half up so people can read their papers, the screen has been grey for years, and the nearest thing to colour management is whichever cable was in the drawer. Everything you loved about a dusk render — the slow gradient from warm interior glow to deep sky, the quiet separation of two dark materials — collapses into a single muddy field about four metres from the projector. What comes through is value structure: a light thing against a dark thing, shapes big enough to read from the back row, and enough air around the building that its outline has somewhere to sit. Send that frame, and the room is looking at the building instead of squinting at a smear.

This is the cheapest test in the business and almost nobody runs it. Desaturate the image before you send it. If the facade argument was a warm brick base set against a cool metal upper, greyscale returns one continuous field and the argument is simply gone — not weakened, gone. The fix isn’t to abandon colour. It’s to make sure every distinction that matters also exists in value: the base darker than the middle, the reveal reading as a shadow rather than a hue shift, the openings punched deep enough to hold their own tone. A scheme that survives being photocopied is a scheme that survives everything else too.

Long before anyone opens the packet properly, someone forwards a link and someone else forms an opinion on a phone, at the bus stop, at the size of a contact photo. Materials are gone at that scale. So is entourage, so is glazing detail, so is every hour you spent on the soffit. What remains is outline and one dominant subject — and that first impression is remarkably hard to move later. Which is worth knowing while you are still choosing the camera: if what makes the scheme good is a roof profile, a tower, an entrance, then compose so that thing owns the silhouette rather than competing with three others for it.

Once an image is in a staff report it gets re-cropped to fit a column, a slide, a template — by someone with no stake in your composition and no idea which part was the answer. The frame below only works whole: the building, the parking it generates, the courts, and the street edge it presents are all in the same picture, which is exactly the point and exactly the risk. Take a third off either side and the parking argument leaves with it. So decide in advance which single fact must survive re-framing, seat it near the centre, and leave enough margin that the image can lose fifteen percent from any side and still say the same thing.

The people who turn up to hearings are not reading your image the way your studio reads it. Nothing is provisional to them. Placeholder signage reads as signage. Four cars in a lot reads as a claim about traffic. A tree drawn at twenty years’ growth reads as shade that will be there on opening day. None of that is dishonest of you and all of it is normal mid-project — the frame below is a perfectly good working view with the shopfront text still unresolved. It is simply not the frame to put in front of a room that will take every element at face value. Walk the image once as a literalist would, and fix what you find; it costs an afternoon and saves a meeting.