This 4 day workshop prepares landscape contractors, whom have little experience of landscape design, to confidently execute a residential landscape design for a client. Participants will be taken through the basics of creating a design, from creating a site survey to evaluating existing site conditions to then completing a basic design and calculating materials needed.

What is Design and Why is Design Important?

Design is formal process that encourages the ability to think beyond what is obvious. Holistically and systematically addressing a problem and coming up with solutions that are functional, appealing and creative. In the most basic sense, Designers are problem solvers. The importance of design is in the process. Design allows room for thinking about a problem and experimenting with the solutions before anything is built. It is about looking at both the small detail of how the hinge makes the door swing, to how the sitting of a dwelling could impact the watershed of an entire region.

Design with Confidence

Whenever any of us try something new, there is always doubt and frustration from lack of experience. This workshop will give confidence to new designers in an effort to ease their transition into this new territory. Becoming a good designer takes years of experience, years of making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. Like with anything, the more you work at it, the better you will become. In saying this, upon completion of this workshop, participants will have a solid foundation from which to begin designing smaller residential projects. You will be walked through the critical steps that you need to think about before you ever put a pen to paper, to confidently producing a completed design that you can present to a client.

Calculating Quantities

A client will always want to know how much a project is going to cost. Price of a project is a detailed exploration on its own, and is pursued further in another Penn State Extension course called: Estimating and Bidding. One of the first steps in creating that estimate however, is knowing how much materials are required to complete the project. We will walk you through the basic techniques for quantifying your design elements. Don’t worry, we will help you through the math too!