We would like to have as many users as possible show off their drawings, and so we’d love to have something about you here.
The basic idea is that we can ‘visit’ each other and look at what we each do. We’d also like people who are thinking about switching to PowerCADD to be able to ‘visit’ you and hear what you have to say about the program.
When we first started the Drawing Room some years ago, the basic idea was that we could ‘visit’ with each other and look at what each person was drawing with PowerCADD. We also wanted people who are thinking about switching to PowerCADD to be able to ‘visit’ you and hear what you have to say about the program.
Over time, the Drawing Room has evolved into much more complete displays of drawings, and we’ve included photographs and images created with PowerCADD used in conjunction with other programs such as Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, SketchUp, Form Z, Adobe Illustrator, etc.
Today, our present mission of the Drawing Room is that we’re out to create the equivalent of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or the National Air & Space Museum in Washington — something so spectacular that it’s a must-visit/you-GOTTA-see-this stop for anyone on the Internet who is interested in design and drawing. The drawings that people are producing with PowerCADD and WildTools today are unlike those done in any other program, and we want the world to see what we are doing.
We’re All in This Together
Are you tired of going to parties and having people make condescending comments about the Mac and how it’s all a Windows/AutoCAD world out there? Well it doesn’t have to be like that, and our best way to fight this is to all work together and show off our work in the Drawing Room. We’re attracting a world-wide audience of people visiting the Drawing Room, and we’re blowing their minds with the drawings that we are doing. That’s not good enough — let’s cause a nuclear chain-reaction in their neurons!
Your page will have a basic format that we will be using throughout. These elements are:
1. Your Message
Write one or more paragraphs that will appear next in the page. Imagine that someone has come into your office and says “Tell me about what you are using, what you do with it and what you think about the program.” Talk to that person. Be conversational and be yourself. Don’t try to cover every detail, but rather the things that mean the most to you. Don’t say that you agree with everything everyone else has said — say something original yourself!
In general, we’re thinking of a typical message of three to five paragraphs, but write what you want to write and if there’s a problem, we’ll get back to you.
2. Photos of You
We can use one or two photos. One would be a thumbnail of just your face to identify the page, and another might be of you in your office, with your family, with your entire office, etc.
If you’re like everyone else, you don’t like photos of yourself, but everyone else likes seeing what the other person looks like. Give us a photo that has some personality to it. If you can’t pick one, then get a close family member to pick it.
However, to have the page listed, you must give us a photo. That is a rule that we’re going to enforce. No photo, no entry in the Drawing Room!
The reason is simple. In the electronic medium of cyberspace, people tend to fly off the handle, get emotional and flame each other. We tend to forget that there’s another real live human being at the other end, and we just start typing in frustration or anger. (“Speak in anger and you will make the best speech you will ever regret”) So the idea here is to let other people see us and so that we will all be kinder to each other.
3. Biographical Information
This will be a bit about you, who you are, what you do and with contact information including your mailing address, email and websites. You will find that people will find you and this has a very wide audience. We’ve had people say they’ve been stopped on the street by people who have seen their drawings in the Drawing Room. Steve Mouzon once sat next to someone on an airline flight who said he had seen the most beautiful rendering of a project. When Steve asked to see it, it turned out to be one of his own drawings. Mark Rhodes is a patent illustrator and he says most of his work comes from people who have seen his work on in the Drawing Room at www.engsw.com. So don’t discount the potential promotional value of this for you. We’ll be careful to spell your name right!
4. Sample Drawings and Photos
In the past, we’ve used a lot of drawings, often with captions explaining how the drawing was done, etc. It became too bulky, so we are now using a less-is-more approach. The drawings are shown in a photo gallery with just a few images or as many as 25.
We want to show a wide variety of drawings to keep it interesting. Some drawings are spectacular and have a lot of aesthetic content all by themselves. Floor plans and simple drawings are less interesting. We want to show a selection, but not a lot of similar drawings. You can make it much more interesting by including photographs of the finished design to go with the drawings, and we definitely want to show that sort of thing.
In some cases, the drawings are proprietary, and you may not want to show even a small glimpse at the drawing, and in that case, we can just show what you’ve designed.
But whatever you do, try to make it interesting. People love to look at drawings by other people and see what they are doing.
How to Prepare Images for the Drawing Room
The easiest way for everyone is to just send in PowerCADD documents and let us do the screen shots. If you use any special fonts, include those as well. Really, this is the easiest way for everyone.
If you want to do the images yourself, then we’re interested in 72-dpi .png or .jpeg images with a maximum size of about 1200 pixels. We are looking for clean images of the drawing, free from any cursors showing, guidelines or page breaks. We want to show the content of the drawing and so we don’t want to show the title bar or other features of the PowerCADD drawing window, and we don’t want any floating windows or tool palettes showing in the image.
We do it with screen shots. The photo gallery automatically sizes the image, so we generally try to zoom in or out until the area you want to show is about 12 to 16 inches in size on the screen.
Open these images in Photoshop, clean them up, crop them down as small as possible and still show the image and then save as JPEG format, and use a medium image quality of 5 or 6. This insures the file size will be small and the image will load quickly on the website.
What About Images from Other Programs?
We are interested in showing off the capability of PowerCADD, alone and in conjunction with other programs. We have lots of images in the Drawing Room produced by using PowerCADD, Photoshop, SketchUp, Form Z, Adobe Illustrator, and many other programs. We want to show all of these.
Submitting Your Entry
Send us the text in an email, Pages or Word files as well as the drawings, images and screenshots.
To submit your entry, email it to the current webmaster of the Drawing Room, presently Alfred Scott, email: [email protected] (doesn’t work at this time) or [email protected]
Update Often!
Website can grow stale if the pages are always the same, so please send up new images whenever you have something that people might want to see.
The Drawing Room on Facebook
We also have a Drawing Room page on Facebook, and we often put images there that are similar to the ones at the Engineered Software web page. We put up a limited selection of images with the idea that we want to direct people to the Drawing Room on the web page where we have a larger selection of users and their drawings.