Digital Design
As a designer, I am quite familiar with projects that involve a good bit of give and take between me and my clients. You know how it goes: the typical process of success by approximation as you work through sets of possibilities and navigate around a couple dead ends before a design is approved and accepted. In a WaterShapes article earlier this year, for instance, I wrote about the ordeal of developing seven distinct
This is a story about possibilities pulled within reach by modern technology. It all started early in 2015, when one of us talked with a friend about the benefits of belonging to a group of like-minded professionals who get together a couple times a year to talk shop, exchange ideas and generally build the kind of camaraderie that's hard to develop if all you do is
This is the story of a project where I'm still not sure which was tested more - my creativity or my patience. It was one of the first design tasks I tackled after moving to Katy, Texas, in 2009. In retrospect, it may not have been the ideal time to relocate: The full force of the Great Recession wasn't clear at that point; I had a job but no direct way to bank on the good reputation I'd built where
Back in 2001, I took a job working for a high-volume pool-construction firm as one of its 30 salespeople. For the first four years or so, I did all of my design work by hand. Quantity was always king in that operation, so I never even left the office: Someone would hand me a set of plans and I'd start working, despite the fact I'd never walked the site, seen its surroundings or had any
I started out on the construction side of the pool industry nearly 20 years ago. Back then, I probably experienced the building process a good 500 times, picking up insights into what determined the level of success of each project. As time passed, I found myself being drawn to the design side: I saw it as a way to put all of those insights to good use; more important, I knew it was where I could do the most good for homeowners. In making the transition, I
As all professional designers know, prospective clients can be unpredictable. Sometimes they get in sync with what we're doing right away, and it seems every step is a positive one. Other times, however, they can be slower to figure things out, and the process can become more complicated. I started working for a pool-construction company soon after graduating from college with a degree in industrial design. This was before
