Instructions

How to Create Your Own 'Page' in the Drawing Room
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.

The Ever-Changing Mission of the Drawing Room 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 user 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, in larger sizes, and we've included photographs and images created with PowerCADD used in conjunction with other programs such as Photoshop, DesignWorkshop, 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 Guggeheim 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. Title Block
At the top of the page, we need your name, and optionally your occupation. Some people don't like to be assigned nicknames by others, so it's a good idea to use the name that you introduce yourself by.

2. Sample Drawing
At the top of the first page, we want to include a screen shot of a sample drawing. There are no hard-and-fast rules on the size of it. We started out using images about 6" wide, but we're going to ever larger drawings now. An 8-inch wide image is a good size, and within the Drawing Room entry, we're now using images about 10" wide so that you can see greater detail.

3. Drawing Captions
Write any description you want below your drawings.

4. 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.

At the bottom of your message, we'll have your name flush right -- the electronic equivalent of a signature.

5. Your Photo
Here we're looking for a small photograph of yourself. Naturally, 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. Generally speaking, we're looking for a small or moderate size photograph, say two to three inches square, but there really aren't any 'specifications' you have to meet here.

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.

6. Biographical Infomation
Use the third person impersonal voice and say something about who you are, where you live and work, where you went to college, etc. You may include some personal notes about your side interests, your address, telephone and fax numbers, your email address, etc. If you have a web page for yourself or your business, then we can include a link to that here, so that people can see more about what you do.

7. More Drawings or Photos
As you can see from the current crop of entries in the Drawing Room, in many cases, the entries have a huge number of drawings. This is great, and we love to show off lots of drawings. Pick drawings that you would show someone if they walked into your office and said "Show me something you've done." We really like to have a drawing that will have some special quality to it, so that people will look at it and say "How did you do that?" And it's really nice if it's something you can't do with one of those other programs!

Try to think of the Drawing Room display as a magazine article, and give it lots of content. If you have a drawing for a part or a house, consider showing a photograph of the finished product. Make it interesting, for example, in the entry for Mark Rhodes, we asked him to explain what patent and trademark drawings are all about. It's much more interesting to see how these drawings relate to actual 'things' that are built and used.

How to Prepare Images for the Drawing Room The Easiest Way 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 GIF or JPEG images. If it's a line drawing, you would typically use GIF. Use JPEG for photographs and drawings with a lot of shades of colors in them. The Easy Way We do it with screen shots. For a ten-inch wide image, resize the drawing window to a width of ten inches -- just hold a ruler up against the monitor -- and then zoom in on the drawing until the image you are after fills the screen. Delete all guidelines, and move all floating windows away so they don't cover up the drawing. Set text greeking to two points. Get a screen shot with Command-Shift-3 or press Command-Shift-4 and draw a selection rectangle. Open these images in Photoshop, clean them up, crop them down as small as possible and still show the image and then save as Compuserve GIF format or JPEG format. If you are saving in JPEG format, 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. The Hard Way If you are going to use the 'Save as JPEG' feature of PowerCADD, you'll want your drawings to look as fantastic on the web as they do on a 600 dpi laser printer. To get this quality, save the drawing as JPEG. You will be prompted to specify the number of pixels for the length and width of the image. The calculation you need to make is based on the final size of the image at a minimum of 300 dpi and perferably 400 dpi. If the image is 6" wide by 5" high, then it would be 2400 by 200 pixels at 400 dpi. Warning, this will require a lot of RAM! Now you will have to open that image in an image editor (typically Photoshop), and reduce it to 72 dpi at the same size. By doing this, you antialias the edges of the lines so they have no jaggies, producing quite a beautiful result. (Thanks for Michael Leckman for these hints.) 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, DesignWorkshop, Form*Z, Adobe Illustrator, and many other programs. We want to show all of these, and we always like to say how the image was produced.

Image saved in GIF format 16,838 bytes

Image resized down slightly to give a slightly out-of-focus image 38,036 bytes (2.3 times as large)

A Special Effect As shown above, you can achieve an interesting effect by resizing the image down slightly in Photoshop. This gives a slightly out of focus image, that you might prefer, but it comes at the expense of increased file size and slower load times.

Submitting your entry:
If you have PageMill or the equivalent, then just throw all the pieces together in a folder, compress it and send it to us. Alternatively, send us the text in Word 98 or earlier, SimpleText or just email us the text and attach the photos.

To submit your entry, email it to the current webmaster of the drawing room, presently Alfred Scott, email: alfred@seqair.com

If you'd like to take over this job, Alfred would like to hear from you!