News from the studio - January ‘25
It’s been a busy few weeks since we launched Digital Landscapes. We’ve run most of courses and done a pilot test of another, and although we received great feedback it hasn’t stopped us from tweaking the syllabus and notes slightly. I suspect this will be an on-going activity, both to incorporate additional bits of content but also to account for updates in software, like the fact that Vectorworks have just launched their 2025 version. There are some big changes from the previous version and given the timing of it, it has certainly created extra work for Emily, who has compiled some incredibly thorough notes to accompany the Vectorworks courses.
We’ve started planning and scheduling courses for 2025, so keep an eye on our calendar as we add these. This has been a task that, when faced with such a wide range of material to cover, has proved tricky in parts - it’s important to us to be able to distill information down so we’re only teaching the important bits, rather than bombarding students with twenty different software options or too many techniques and sometimes this can mean going through several iterations of a plan before realising it’s not quite the right one!
We also have a couple of free courses coming up - one will be a deep dive into Materials in SketchUp (everything you ever wanted to know and quite a bit that you didn’t know you wanted to know) and the other will teach you how to create your own custom title blocks in Vectorworks. These are aimed as a free taster to give people an idea of what our teaching is like without having to pay for a course.
One thing we hadn’t anticipated was quite how relentless the treadmill of social media is. Looking back it would’ve been sensible to have amassed a large stockpile of imagery, blog posts and YouTube videos, bit we’re merrily working our way through a lengthy list of ideas for blog posts, tips to share on YouTube and instagram and more lengthy tutorials. Keep watching this space!
Starting a business like this is new to Emily and I, so we’ve also been doing our own CPD. This has involved lots of webinars from the likes of the Landscape Institute, SGD, Vectorworks and so on, and also an excellent day at a Google Garage event learning about how to improve our search engine rankings as well as utilising their and other AI tools for business development. If you run a small business then check out Enterprise Nation who run the Google Garage events and many others.
Finally, if you like what you see and want to help us out, please do share our site and Instagram posts with your fellow designers, and if you’d like to get in touch and see how we can help then do give us a call.