News From The Studio: April ‘25

Another month has come to an end, as we hurtle rapidly towards the hazy days of summer. We’ve taught all of our courses now (except Advanced Vectorworks, which is still WIP), the last one being Creating Great Visuals which was deliberately scheduled last as I knew it would be a monster to put together. Over 60 pages of course notes later, I can confirm that my fears were well placed! I am, however, super happy with how it went. It’s designed to teach a wide range of techniques, mostly Photoshop-based, and work through different ways of combining them to really give you a massive range of styles so you can pin down the ones that work bed for your and develop your own unique way of showing off your designs. .

On that note, Emily and I bought ourselves iPads and I’ve just used it for the first time with a design project, both for visuals and a masterplan. They’re not perfect but I’m reasonably happy with them (the motto over here being “progress not perfection”! ) for a first try - these are what’s illustrating this post.

Emily has taken some literal gardening leave - a break from work over the Easter school holidays to hang out her unstoppable seven year old and spend some time doing some work in her own garden (you may have seen some photos on her Instagram).

The major task ahead for us now is starting to record courses. We’ve got two free courses coming first - one on title blocks in Vectorworks and the other on materials in SketchUp. They’re essentially to give people a taste of us for free, both our actual teaching but also the online platform that we’re using. They’ll be broken down just like our full courses, into short clear modules with lots of exercises for you to practise. The recording side is getting there - it’s been a lot of work fiddling around with microphones, software and so on, but slowly onwards and upwards we go!