Paul Krush

Did you know you can buy home, deck, and garden design software at Target?

Do people play with home design software before going to architect? If so, how has that changed custom home design? Do people rough out the house design, and let the architect detail it? This was one of the directions I was heading when I was working on that 3 stone trellis ring software in the end of 2003. I have not thought about it much lately until several people brought it up here in the forums.

One could write software that would let people rough out custom rings though a series of controls and parameters.

Having consumers rough out the ring first fits some rules I have for consumer design software to work in an independent retail store.

Those rules are; Will the consumer jewelry design software (or kiosks too):
1.) Keep the relationship?
2.) Build the local community?
3.) Be sustainable?

Would free consumer jewelry design software like this hurt an independent retail store? Sure I can think of many ways. One becomes defeatist when you go down this path. Pretty much you can argue that Gemvision cannot make its products better, because in doing so it will smother its current customer base. Every copy of Matrix they sell makes the rest of the copies less valuable though this thinking.

Does a $20 home design package cheapen the work of a professional architect? Of course not, this is mearly a better (maybe) way for the consumer to communicate to the architect. Some people might need to be educated on this.

Why do I keep coming back to consumer jewelry design software? This will be one of the ways jewelry will be designed in the future, and I want to be part of it. Good or bad it’s a compulsion I have.

These are some of the rings I did with a program I wrote 3 1/2 years ago. You enter in a bunch of parameters and it modeled the ring for you. I can do a much much better job at writing this software these days. I was just goofing off with some of these designs. It’s pretty fun using it.