It’s been a slow news period at the beginning of the year around here, and I stumbled onto this great little animation that involves our favorite subject. I hope you are all getting inspired to do your best work this year. 

This work is an alphabetical list of the most important architects with their best known building. 
A lot of them have been left out with grief because we only need one for each letter and we done an effort to have differents nationalities.

 
If you love architecture, for more staff you can follow us in ombuarchitecture.tumblr.com

The ABC of Architects from fedelpeye on Vimeo.

I’m so glad they started with Aalto!

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Sometimes when you’re modeling a project the size of a building, you need to be able to get inside and focus on objects obscured by the outer geometry. In this video tutorial, I show you four ways to get in there so you can do just that, and of course there are a few other tips and tricks along the way.

This is something Bonzai3d and FormZ are really good at, and you can apply these techniques to other 3d modelers like SketchUp and Revit as well. After watching this Methodcast, you’ll be able to use one or more of the following methods: 

• Clipping planes
• The copy/paste & replace trick
• Isolate
• Edit the cone of vision

Download a 30 trial of Bonzai3d here.

Download the beta of FormZ here.

This quote has been on my mind lately, and because of today's event it has been underscored even more:

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

— Steve Jobs

Design has meaning.

I've had Steve Jobs' Harvard Commencement Speech open in one of my browser tabs for a few weeks now, and if you need a kick in the ass, you should watch it.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Now go out and create something. Make something that lasts. Something that's yours. Stop thinking about the now, and start thinking about the future.

Wacom is now showing off a new product called Inkling that'll be out next month that looks really cool. It's a digitally enhanced sketching pen and receiver that you can use with normal paper. I was in the office the other day showing some friends a new stylus I got for my iPad (review forthcoming) and the question came up about pressure sensitivity. The iPad isn't pressure sensitive, so we wondered about developing a stylus where the tip of it was pressure sensitive instead of waiting for Apple to enhance their screens in this way. Well, it's been done now... another short-lived million dollar idea! It's OK, I have lots more.

This new pen has Wacom's typical (and I mean that in a good way) 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity built into the tip of the pen. No, it's not a stylus. It is an actual ink pen that you draw with, and when combined with a receiver you attached to a sheet of paper, records your sketch digitally. Once you are done, you plug the receiver into your Mac or Windows box and transfer the sketch file into Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. You could also open up an image in any image-reading app, but the benefit to the aforementioned programs is that the lines you sketched turn into vectors and are editable after the fact! It even supports layers... just tap the receiver at the top of your paper to add a new layer on the fly. This is pretty much a game-changer. My jaw has dropped.

My reservations are that it looks like a ballpoint pen, and I really don't like to use those for sketching. I'm hoping it's something that flows a bit more fluidly. I also don't think I'd drop $200 for it, but we'll see what happens. There will be plenty of people who will buy it if it gets some good reviews.

This would be a great tool in a designer's hands and I'm looking forward to it. Imagine sketching some underlays, transferring them to Illustrator, adjusting and sending them to a CAD program for further editing. Awesome.

Here's their promotional video:

For those of you who couldn't make it this year, you can see some of the things I thought really stood out at the Dwell Conference in Los Angeles this year on my personal blog. I didn't get a photo of everything... maybe next time.