Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Building Buildings in Google Docs

Everyone who knows me knows how excited I get about collaboration - and how especially excited I was when Google Docs' drawing tool was launched as a collaborative editing surface. On a few occasions, I've initiated collaborative scribbling sessions with 3 or 30 people simultaneously, just for the creative kick we all get out of it (an especially active session was triggered by my favorite web-tech blogger, when her quick ping to her followers triggered a flood of creative participants).

When I saw the quality of content a few others had created when we added drawings to the Google Docs Template Gallery, I was inspired to try some myself. So, for a few moments (ahem) per day over the past week, I ventured on a more soloist approach in an attempt to create some useful and realistic-ish drawings of some great city landmark buildings. I initially set out to draw, in rough form, just the Empire State Building. Hmph... that was easy enough - so I just kept going. Transamerica was a bit more challenging, and the Space Needle required some artistic license. My favorite building (second of course to my real favorites), the Chrysler Building, almost made me cry give up - but I persisted and even got that into a form which (when squinting) is acceptable...
So the template drawing is in the gallery (full preview here) - enjoy it, use it, laugh at it, or make fun of my rare obsessive behavior which resulted in these drawings. Maybe next time I'll invite a few dozen of my closest artistic friends to collaboratively create every other landmark building in a tenth of the time ;)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

JR;When will the "append" function be fixed?Joe Pratt

Anonymous said...

JR;When will the "append" function be fixed?Joe Pratt

Saif said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Saif said...

Hello Jr,
I am using your show n tell gadget...for charting some data...got a doubt..
When i select a range from where the contents are picked up ,how do i hide the cell description that is coming on top of my chart .
For you reference i am sharing the sheet where i have deployed you gadget.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tIcgOiPALUIrrd2O5tCp4vg&waffle=false&forced=true#gid=0