One of the biggest debates for a small start-up, and one that we experienced first hand, is the issue of how much of your capital to spend on computer stuff.
As we began making our wishlist of software, hardware, and other capital expenses, we realized that the decisions we were making about what to invest in now would probably be with us for the life of the company. What I mean is that it’s rare that a small practice makes a massive switch from PC’s to Macs, or from AutoCAD to Vectorworks, simply because of the financial implications of converting everything and basically starting a new learning curve.
That’s why we decided that reading through the millions of forums and reviews on products was an essential step in determining which professionals out there are happiest with their setups.
In the end, we made a list of criteria and we chose hardware and software to match based on priority. These are the decisions we made, based on the theory that we would spend a little more money to save time and improve efficiency (especially because there are only two of us in the office):
Computers and Operating Systems:
I was a PC girl. He was a Mac guy. However, in the year before the conception of Emu Architects, the frequency with which I made up excuses to use his Macbook Pro over my Dell Inspiron grew exponentially. I eventually converted, and I haven’t looked back since. This key decision to fork out more dough for the Macs ultimately afforded us more flexibility with high-power software. Plus, with Parallels, we don’t have to worry when someone sends us a Windows-only file format.
CAD Software:
This was to be the core of how our business would operate. After researching to confirm our suspicions, we decided that everyone in the industry who is not using BIM software is completely crazy. We settled on Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD, and we even won a free license from filling out those surveys that you always think are a waste of time (see Graphisoft’s article on our win)! Armed with this fantastic software, we completely eliminated the need for an external 3D software. In fact, we also gained a huge amount in time savings, because of the fact that all cost estimations, project documentation, and rendering are done within ArchiCAD. It truly made it possible for two people to get everything done in the same time as a team of people working on an AutoCAD project. That extra time can now be spent in the rendering or in other communications and presentation material.
Graphic Communications and Presentation Software:
One of our explicit goals as a company is to offer a higher level of communication than is standard practice here in Italy. This meant we needed tools that would allow us to create and publish well designed graphic material efficiently. We also wanted the ability to create well formatted templates for presentations to clients and correspondence with other professionals. Our communications software now includes:
Artlantis: Although we are still in the demo mode at the moment, we are fairly certain that this secret software will be well worth it. It raises the level of presentation material with respect to time investment drastically. Look forward to future posts about our experiences with it.
RapidWeaver: We recently decided on this relatively inexpensive software for our new website design Our current published website is a quicky from iWeb and is seriously lacking in SEO (search engine optimization) features. Again – the decision to go for this software came from people’s comments in the forums about short learning curves and time efficiency. (see update)
Adobe CS4 and Acrobat: We could probably just do with InDesign and Acrobat, actually. This is what we use for all office document templates to ensure consistency of graphic layout. Everything, and I mean everything gets PDF’d before it is archived in our files. We also tend to use Photoshop a lot for quick photo fixing.
Office Administration Software:
We have been very impressed with iWork ‘09, but are also huge supporters of OpenOffice (free!). This is a good area to save some bucks and go for the open source package. In fact, other than Numbers (the iWork version of Excel), we very rarely use normal office software other than to import information sent to us from other people. (update: we’ve had to purchase Excel for Mac because Numbers was not able to handle large databases and complicated spreadsheets)
For quick word processing (which I use to help me save blog posts), we use Bean (free!). The last to mention is, of course, Skype (free!)- which fortunately is becoming quite standard in Europe as a professional communication tool.
In Summary: the stuff we paid for that we couldn’t live without -
our Macs
ArchiCAD
Artlantis
And that’s it. Not so big a list, huh? Hopefully this combination will last us for the next decade or so with a few upgrades every now and then. Perhaps by the time we are veterans, BIM will have caught on as the industry standard and we’ll become the slow ones who need to hire employees to increase our CAD productivity. But until then we’ll enjoy the flexibility of remaining a two-person operation.
