Pool Studio
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
It all started at the Orlando pool expo last November, when Noah Nehlich stopped by the WaterShapes booth toward the end of the show and asked how we might work together. He's the founder of Structure Studios (which produces the Pool Studio software system), and I have to admit that I'd never been terribly receptive to the concept of digital design. At that point, in fact, I was still so
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
I've been working with digital design technology for nearly ten years at this point, and I have to say that the rate of change with both the software and the hardware has been rapid enough to make a casual observer's head spin. And that's fine, because those of us who've been involved with it from the beginning have come to expect no less. In my case, however, I didn't start out with computer design. In fact, I'd been working as
I grew up in my father's pool business - a successful design/build firm based in Henderson, Nev. Even in high school, I was consciously preparing myself to get involved on the design side of things and had signed up for a drafting class to start developing the requisite drawing skills. But something big was happening in the late 1990s: I was all set for my drafting class and had equipped myself with the tools I'd need
I followed a well-worn path when I started designing watershapes: I acquired a drafting table and worked at gaining proficiency in the use of pencils, protractors, scales, squares, various templates, colored markers and a multiplicity of other drawing tools as a means of communicating design ideas to my clients. To this day, I have great admiration for those who work quickly and decisively with these tools, but about ten years ago I was introduced to an array of digital design systems - and I've been
