Hello, Gentle Readers. I miss you. I apologize for the sporadic posts of late…have you wondered why that’s been? It’s for a good cause – an exciting cause – but an exhausting and time-consuming one.
I am co-authoring a designer’s guide to the drawing program Google SketchUp, and it will be published by Pearson. We’ve had deadlines recently. Several of them.
(SketchUp , by the way, is is downloadable FOR FREE via this link. Of course I was the last known person to actually PAY for SketchUp several years ago; 10 minutes after I pressed “buy now,” the program was acquired by Google and became available for free. Figures!)
Anyway, the brilliant Bonnie Roskes of 3D Vinci is the super-author of the book. She wrote The Sketch-Up Cookbook, which remains an excellent – possibly the definitive – guide to the program.
Bonnie was a client several years ago, and it was she who introduced me to it. “You don’t use SketchUp?” she asked, incredulous. “But do you know what it can DO?” And within minutes, she had created a scale model of her kitchen, “painted” the floor w/ the actual tile we planned to use, dropped in pre-drawn models of the stove, refrigerator, etc., and chose the exact color of her countertop from the Google 3D Warehouse.
It was pretty amazing.
Like many designers and architects, I was trained in AutoCad. It isn’t intuitive…but to be fair, my projects didn’t require me to use it often enough to become truly proficient.
Warm and fuzzy SketchUp, on the other hand, really IS easy. Easier, anyway; the more you know, the more you can get it to do, of course. We’re writing this guide especially for interior designers – and aspiring designers and all-around talented people like you, who want to make the world more beautiful, starting w/ your own homes.
So. Between co-writing this book, tending to client projects – you know, the actual DESIGN part of my life :) – training a second bossy color superstar, and effecting the transition from Quickbooks (Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, you overly complicated, pompous accounting program!) to Design Manager (Come on it! Would you like some tea? Or a Diet Coke, perhaps?), I’ve been a little busy. Sleep has not been a priority. But food has, believe me.
Thank you for your patience. More on bossy color’s exciting – or at least entertaining – design projects soon, and get ready for the new SketchUp guide to hit the shelves at the end of the year.
Or whenever Bonnie and I finish it.
(Are ANY designers using Auto-Cad, or is that now exclusively for architects? What drawing programs – if any – do you use? Any highly skilled hand-renderers out there?)
Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She has been quoted in publications from The Washington Post to Real Simple and is considered an expert on color, residential space planning, and telling people what to do in the nicest way possible.
