So when I was an architecture student, I always felt so lost when I began my project. Up until I was a 50 year student, I still couldn't check the feeling of an ease when starting a new plan for a building. Everything just seems so overwhelming. But eventually I managed to cope with it by using a few tips and techniques I discovered along my architecture journey. And today I'm going to share these tips with you guys. Tip number one, design for people. Okay guys, story time. Back when I was in school I used to just create plants and drawings that were suited to my liking. Basically I just drew up buildings that looked good to me and I always had low grades. And I wondered why. It wasn't until I was in my fourth year that I was able to understand how architecture and design really is. I found out or somewhat figured out that the designs I was doing wasn't for me, but for the clients or users of the building. You see guys, great architects didn't design beautiful buildings just because they wanted to look super cool in front of their colleagues or they wanted to show off their design skills like, look how good I am at designing for everything. Or look how abstract my church is compared to yours. Anyways, they made those designs with the users best interest in mine. So the better you know the people who are going to use your building, the better the design you are going to come up with. So when I discovered this, I researched nine structures and professors. Found out what they like, what they dislike, their favorite colors and their beliefs. And I designed my school projects around this database of information. For example, my design professor is a fan of modern architecture and loves the color red. So what I did was whenever possible and applicable, I made some of my plates under that professor a bit modern and then I added a few red accents and voila. To make sure price my grades went up. I figured that in school our clients are our professors, so might as well design for them. So yeah, researcher clients well and for sure you are going to create a wonderful and amazing design. Tip number two, keep it simple. So once you're done doing research on the people that you are going to design for, it is now time to begin designing. So one of my favorite parts of designing is the conceptualization stage. At first I had a hard time conceptualizing because I did not know what, where or like how to begin. That is until I discovered a few things that helped me come up with concepts. First is you need to keep your concepts simple, the simpler the better. If you guys noticed most of the iconic buildings and structures, silhouettes could be drawn within a few strokes. Like the Sydney Opera House or the Hayder Aliyev Centre, the Burj Al Ara, or even the Great Pyramids. So definitely sticking to simple massing and shapes will help you create great designs and will save you a ton of time. Speaking of time, it is now time for me to talk about this video's sponsor. PDF Element Pro by Wandercher. PDF Element Pro is an awesome PDF editing software that allows you to edit and add text to PDF. So you could create beautiful planner pages such as this. Use it to plan out your architecture or schedule by editing one of the free planner templates that the awesome people at PDF Element Pro are kind enough to give you guys the Archi Squad for free. Check the links in the description down below to get the free 10 item planner pack and plan out your Archi Life guys. Okay, so PDF Element Pro does a ton of other things aside from editing planners. With this software, you could also edit images by cropping it, rotating it, and mirroring it. It also lets you combine multiple PDFs, reducing the hassle of having to open each PDF and individually printing it. This is my favorite feature since I often have to make a ton of plans with multiple pages. And I often send them to colleagues. So PDF Element Pro helps me combine those PDFs and saves me a ton of time. Another feature I really love about PDF Element Pro is its OCR or Optical Character Recognition, which basically means that PDF Element Pro will detect text characters and convert them into a copy-pasteable text file that you could copy from the scanned PDF into your word file. So usually when you scan a book into a PDF, you really can't copy the text because the PDF is basically like some sort of flat bitmap image. But with this program and its OCR, you can now easily copy text from scanned files. Super awesome PDF editing software guys go check them out, links in the description. Okay guys, back to our tips. Tip number three, imagine here. So the word imagine here comes from the combination of the words, imagine and engineer. But why not imagine and architect? Imagine, architect, imagine a tech that just sounds horrible Bob. You're fired. Anyway, it's super bad acting aside. What does imagineer mean? It means to imagine your designs first. No matter how impossible it seems, you know, just imagine it. Then later on you can engineer it to adhere to the world's physical limitations. Kind of like when anime creators imagine anime characters with hair that defy V6, V6, V6, then in Filipino accent. So the first step is to just think of the most awesome design you can possibly think of. Do not think of how it will be built or what materials you will need or the budget or, you know, whatever. Just let your imagination run while then crazy and fly off to a super far land. So by flying away to a far far away land, you will find that the feeling of fear that hinders you from creating wonderful designs is gone. This will help you come up with truly marvelous structures and concepts. Marvelous, marvelous, gosh dang it. Okay, so after you have come up with a crazy idea, it is now time to come back to Earth. Adjust your crazy design to fit within the realm of possibility. So figure out ways to make your design work without sacrificing much of its wonders. This is where true innovation comes from. If the people who designed Birch Khalifa was worried about it being too tall, then it would not be standing today. Or if the architects of the bird's nest stage him just played safe and made a rectangular stage him, then the world would be a more boring place. Be not afraid guys. Fear is what holds us back. So be brave and just enjoy designing guys. And with that super inspirational message, let us move on to our tip number 4. Quantitecter. Quantitecter from the word Quantity and Architecture. That just sounds super awful, man. Gosh dang it did Bob ride this. Anyways, as I was saying, create as much concepts as you can. The more concepts you create, the better the chance you have at arriving at a very great design or like a wonderful concept. So whenever a concept relies on I love to use permanent pens like a Sakura brush pen or like a Uni pin. This way I won't be inclined to erase a part of the concept I don't like. If I don't like a concept I just move on to another sheet or another part of the paper. This way I could look back at my past concepts and maybe derive and combine a few ideas from these past sketches. Also when sketching preliminary concepts I like to keep them as small as I could. This way I could sketch faster and also save a lot of paper space. I ain't got money to keep buying paper. I'm super broke right now guys. Also don't wait about making your concept while sketch is looking good. You can refine it later on. Here are a few sketches of iconic buildings by Great Architects so you guys could see that Great Buildings often come from humble sketches on table napkins. So just keep sketching and creating. Tip number five and probably the most cliché is just to be yourself. Now I didn't come up with this just because I ran out of ideas and I needed this list to be like five tips. Yeah that's probably the reason why I made this tip. Gosh dang it. Jokes aside I often forget this cliché line to be myself. Oftentimes when I'm designing I find myself trying to copy an architect style or their concept and it's fine to copy when you're just starting out but at some point you have to develop your own style. So developing your own style is not necessarily coming up with something entirely original that nobody has ever come up with before ever. Creating your own style is getting all of the things that influence you. Getting inspiration from this architect or this designer or this building. Then from those you either combine those influences and then improve upon the combination and make your own style. So don't just settle on copying someone else's style guys that's just super lame. You guys got to innovate. Get already existing ideas and improve upon them. That is what I believe the purpose of us architects and architecture students are in this world. We are here to create innovate and generally make our world a better place and with that being said I hope I inspired you guys to design and to architect. That statement made no sense. Anyways I hope you guys learned something new today. Thank you guys so much for watching my video. Until the next time, Arkeys Quad represent Flying Peach!