Old Buildings are hard to draw

I’ve recently done some CAD work for my Father-in-Law who runs Mayflower Homes. The work was the drawing up of both some existing and proposed plans of a large house in London which he intends to buy, renovate and re-sell.

Old buildings are quite hard to draw accurately for a number of reasons.

1. they’re not made out of nice regular bricks; but rather stone of various sizes; therefore walls tend to vary in thickness rather randomly.
2. walls are thicker and so door and window openings are much more complex
3. old buildings have usually undergone various DIY projects which means rooms, layout and spaces are complex. You can see form the image above how the different shaped rooms struggle to fit together.

But probably the most annoying thing when it comes to drawing up old and altered buildings is this: there are far too many doors. Looka t the number of doors in those plans. TOO MANY!!

New Breed

I had a great meeting with New Breed today. The meeting was partly to talk about their Jump School training which I hope to go on to learn and meet people.

But our meeting was also to talk about a New Breed website. They have kindly let me build them a website – which I’m looking forward to. I’ll be, probably, the biggest website I’ve ever created from scratch and they’ll be loads for me to learn on the way. Here’s my plan/propals for them:

Lines and Gradients

As I was just reading a blog post last night on webdesign, one thing struck me: a lot can be achieved with a little. This is widely applicable statement, but one example will suffice:

A lot can be achieved with the addition of 1 line and a few simple gradients:

image these images as horizontally repeated background images. Which would have better impact? Well that depends somewhat on the context. If it’s a simple and bold sight making much of simple juxtaposition – then maybe the first image.

But most sites would benefit more from the second image – which is identical except the addition on one line and three small white->transparent gradients.

5seconds extra work – lots more impact.

Slight mistake

Ok, so I said pretty much everything has been designed. Obviously there are a few execption:

http://www.havenworks.com/

http://www.connectipro.com/

http://www.lingscars.com/

http://www.photographertoronto.com/

Some websites that are designed to be bad:

http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/

http://www.theworstwebsite.com/ – don’t go here if you are in a rush!!!!

Revitalise

So, I thought I might start writing some stuff here on Beautility. So I’m going to start focussing on design (especially web design).

I love design, especially web design. Design pervades all things. Just look around you, and see if you can spot something that hasn’t undergone a design process. Nope!

Doors, laptops, mugs, cables, windows – they’ve all been designed.

So, regarding webdesign, I love learning about and using HTML, CSS, Javascript (jQuery), PHP and MySQL. So when I learn or find something good – I’ll post it…and we’ll see that happens