Lately, I had read this post, and the other dealing with CAD.
In addition, I read comments on another site's forum, in which many successful designers testified to benefits of using design software.
Some ideas are:
Professionalism, Speed, Etc..
For fun, I went out this week and bought a CAD program. Not a fancy one. But enough to see what I think about designing on a computer screen.
It only took about 3 hours for me to decide against doing it. I don't care if a $2000 program is 3 times better.
What I realized is; there is no way that viewing a piece of property on a screen can remotely come close to looking at a nice size 24" x 36" sheet of paper. On the large sheet, all of the elements are visible at one time along with notes around the perimeter that indicate the environment around - what's next door, how many degrees to the south or north a view is. I mark all these on my large plans, and can see the whole shot in a decent size view at once.
Also, by reducing my symbol types to about 4, and modifying them slightly, I found that hand design can be done quite quickly, especially by adding vellum with a grid.
And the electric erasers make changes fairly speedy. Although I've only had about 70 minutes of changes for the last 8 designs all together.
This does not mean I will never do a design on my CAD program. I'll bet I use it for the small area renovations.
Also, I use CAD a lot for diagrams. Like a hedge that reduces in height at the ends while it also scrolls inward. CAD makes a nice drawing of something like that for an illustration that can be pasted on a hand drawn design.
My computer is used for the plant lists.
Some designers get wrapped up in what their plan looks like. Well, its an installation tool. If the dot is in the right place, that's what matters.
Designers should be getting hired by what the photographs look like and the testimonials, more so than the design artsiness.
A sample of my plans are at
www.mdvaden.com in the page Landscape Design. That one was colored for show. I deliver them black and white. Although I am starting to pay my kids to color in one plan sheet when we do the install. It makes distinguishing placements easier by having contrast on the sheet.