Last weekend The Society of Garden Designers’ Spring Conference was an incredibly popular affair. Tickets were sold out weeks before the event and the
Ready for action – before the crowds arrived
exhibition hall was also full to bursting! The conference was titled “Beyond Borders” and focused on the role of planting in delivering outstanding garden design. For Garden Designers and Landscape Architects everywhere, Vectorworks has proved invaluable in creating planting plans. It enables designers to commit design thoughts to a plan quickly and easily, using favourite combinations, complete with maintenance information if required, from a database of over 8,000 plants. In fact, planting
Vectorworks Landscape Area with planting by percentage.
capability is one of the key reasons designers turn to Vectorworks when looking to move their design practice forward. Plants can be placed individually or in groups using the Place Plant tool. You can use the huge library of plant graphics or create your own. Alternatively, if you don’t want to see individual plants but want to cover an area with a planting mix, use the Landscape Area tool.
2D Plant Symbols with automatically generated labels in Vectorworks Landmark.
Whichever method is most appropriate for you, Vectorworks can do the really tough bit and count the plants for you!
The conference itself is one where the delegates sit in on lectures and then rush to the exhibition hall for refreshments and lunch in-between. Even with three of us on the stand, it’s still difficult to withstand the crashing wave of visitors as they pour into the exhibition hall. However, we love it! Both the Spring and Autumn conferences are a fantastic showcase for the capabilities of Vectorworks Landmark. Not only that, but our job is made easier by the host of current users eager to explain to non-users the benefits that Vectorworks has brought them. In fact, the two days each year are somewhat like a student reunion, with clients from all over the UK (and occasionally farther afield) turning up to say hello.
Now, we are into the hard work, following up all the people we met, trying to find enough hours in the day to fit in all the online demonstrations that have been booked. Whilst Vectorworks can be downloaded as an evaluation version for 30 days, many people find the online demonstration a great way to get some initial understanding of what Vectorworks can do and how easily it can do it. In some ways, the evaluation on its own can be a bit like someone parking a Formula One car on your drive and telling you to take it for a spin! You might find it difficult to know where to start and you might never reach 4th gear or understand the best way of overtaking. Essentially the online demonstration gets round this by allowing us to share our screen with you, while we talk at the same time – so you see exactly what we are doing and can ask any questions you have along the way.
The online demonstration is also a good way to understand whether an upgrade to Vectorworks 2012 will be useful for you.
So if you are an existing user thinking about upgrading, considering the move to Vectorworks from another CAD system, or contemplating the move away from hand drawing, please email us at info@vectorworks-training.co.uk or call us on 01488 658580 to set up a time and date of your own.
