Moved the office to State Park campground

mdvaden

On another thread, Ekka replied to a test photo of mine, about "taking the kitchen sink".

Figured I'd share the story.

We're not yet moved to north Oregon, but someone wanted me to design a landscape plan for the front bed of a condomium.

My son wanted to see a buddy in Vancouver, Washington. So I accepted the project, dropped my son off, and traveled west an hour and a half, having reserved 4 days at Nehalem Bay State Park (see my advice page).

Anyway, there is electric for recreational vehicles. So I brought my laptop computer, HP printer and portable drafting table. I arrived Thursday morning. Drafted Friday afternoon from noon to supper, and again on Saturday morning from 8am to 1pm.

That left all Thursday, the bulk of Friday, the bulk of Saturday, and all Sunday to Monday morning for camping, hiking Neahkahnie Mountain

http://www.mdvaden.com/neahkahnie_mountain.shtml

Shopping at Cannon Beach and Seaside, and visiting a couple of beaches. Great Pizza at Fultano's if you ever get to Cannon Beach.

I have a DVD player and TV in the trailer near the refrigerator, so I went to Manzanita a couple of miles away and rented several DVDs.

Anyhow, that's the story behind bringing the kitchen sink...

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Eric Frei

Mario

You find that using the ole fashioned drawing board gives better holistic view of the project?

I find most designers here still like to use it, however the PC programs work very well too.

So, froma guy that does this stuff often, what's the pro's and cons?

Nice office, no bears are there?

__________________

mdvaden

Pros for a landscape architect, is that with CAD on a computer, they can overlay files, or share the files among different trades.

Some changes can be done instantaneous on a computer.

But in general, I find the hand drawn to be totally fine. It really matters where the dot is. No matter how fancy or textured it looks, it all comes down to the dot and the name of a dot.

I know some tricks to cut drawing time, even with templates.

For example, if a group of 50 daylilies will be in an area, I find no need to draw 50 dots or shrub icons. I just write an "ID" letter like "R" with the number...

R x 50

And then I draw lines with arrows outward from it showing it's region, that "R" fills that gap between other shrubs. The small plants are going to fall to the installer's placement disgression anyhow.

Here's a photo of one of my more basic designs plans - note: no frills. And you can see two areas toward the lower left where arrows radiate from an ID letter.

If a purple beech tree is to go in a spot, it won't matter whether the symbol is a circle, a pastel sketch or an artistic arrangement of lines. Wherever the dot goes, there will be a beech tree.

So the quality of a design plan resides totally in what the designer sees, and places on an X / Y grid. Whether it's CAD, handdrawn or sketched is irrelevent for quality.

The latter really matter if a certain kind of presentation needs to be made.

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