Planet Vectorworks

The end of the semester is here, and whether you’re spending your summer at home, interning, or on vacation, take a few minutes to repurpose your projects for a chance to win $10,000 with a Vectorworks Design Scholarship. Closing July 15, all you need to do to be in the running for the scholarship is submit your stellar project and answer just three questions in 150 words or less each.

It’s a wrap– the 2017 eight regional festivals organized by the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF), a national program organized to celebrate college theater in the United States, have officially ended. Since 1969, KCACTF has helped students develop their creative and technical skills. As a part of KCACTF’s mission, the program holds eight regional festivals annually for students offering workshops, discussions, scholarships, and award programs.

We’ve discussed how to apply to the Vectorworks Design Scholarship, what you get if you win, and best practices for applying — but what does it actually mean to win? How can the scholarship affect your professional career and be the major résumé booster that it promises to be? To find out, we caught up with Martha Carter and Morgan Price, who took home a 2015 Vectorworks Design Scholarship, to see what they’re up to now and how winning jumpstarted their careers.

Cue the spotlight! This year, we’re helping put students center stage at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) by sponsoring awards at KCACTF’s eight regional festivals.

Group projects can inspire a sense of dread in the hearts of even the toughest design students. The idea of compromising your design aesthetic, giving up a little bit of control, or working with someone who doesn’t pull their weight can be terrifying, but overall group projects have an unfair reputation. Some of the best projects come from group work, and it’s likely that you’ll have to work with others throughout your professional career, which means it’s time for an attitude overhaul. So, in the spirit of collaboration, we gathered some advice from both current and recent students on how to make your group projects more successful, and hopefully more enjoyable.

Long nights, early mornings — it’s tough being a student sometimes. On top of the large workload, you have to think about the cost of tuition, materials, and all the other odds and ends that accompany college life. That’s why we want the hard work you put into your projects to be worth more than just a good grade, so we’re launching the third annual Vectorworks Design Scholarship. Now your all-nighters can score you up to $10,000 USD, a major resume booster, and free publicity that will get you noticed by potential employers.

We’ve recognized over 30 of the world’s most outstanding design students over the past two years with Vectorworks Design Scholarships. So to supplement this ongoing program and further our commitment to tomorrow’s visionaries, we’re sponsoring the 2016 Young Talent Architecture Award (YTAA). This inaugural prize supports graduating architects, urban planners, and landscape architects in Europe, helping them to transform the world and create remarkable experiences with their designs.

While many of us were gearing up for the New Year, Germany and Austria experienced a tour like no other – if design is your thing, that is. Our Vectorworks distributor, ComputerWorks GmbH, tackled 20 cities with its "Inside Vectorworks 2016" tour, attracting nearly 1,500 attendees and seizing every chance to share our latest software release through group demos, one-on-one sessions, and workshops that touched upon everything from collaborative workflows and 3D planning in landscape architecture to Spotlight training by one of the program's biggest worldwide users PRG, as well as interesting case studies, and quick tips for architectural design success.

It’s been a monumental year for the design industry, beginning with female architects like Denise Scott Brown receiving the American Institute of Architects' top award, the Gold Medal, along with her husband and partner Robert Venturi. We also witnessed a global commitment toward building a more sustainable world with the European Commission's 2020 Energy Strategy. Then we saw the fulfillment of the "Back to the Future" movie franchise’s prediction that hoverboards would be real.

Earlier this year, student Benno Schmitz of the Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin received an assignment with one overarching instruction: merge culture and nature into one structure. Working with his professors over the course of a semester, Schmitz took this mission to heart, designing a building that tied the landscape surrounding Bonn, Germany, which is close to where he grew up, into the city’s urban fabric. After months of work, Schmitz believed his vision for The Museum of Contemporary Arts in Bonn could be worth more than a grade, so he submitted his creation to the Vectorworks Design Scholarship. An esteemed panel of global judges agreed, selecting Schmitz's work as the best among over 2,000 entries submitted to the program and honoring him with its $10,000 grand prize and Richard Diehl Award.

The results are in! After an international panel of design professionals and academics reviewed the over 2,000 submissions to this year’s Vectorworks Design Scholarship, the winning projects have been selected. Benno Schmitz from the Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin received the Richard Diehl Award, the scholarship program’s $10,000 grand prize, for his design for The Museum of Contemporary Arts in Bonn.