Still Learning

I have been working on a bigger project the last couple of days, and I want to wait until I'm finished with that before I post it. It could be a decent portfolio piece when I'm done. I suppose it might be good to post it here in rough draft form to get a critique from my readers (both of them). Tonight I worked on reverse engineering a teakettle which was designed by OXO, my favorite kitchenware designer. They make products that look nice, feel nice, and work well. The full user experience is accounted for, not just the purchasing portion. Our previous teakettle looked nice, but was too heavy and had a few design flaws that made it very tough to use. The OXO kettle is a much more complicated design, with curvature along two axes, a linkage in the handle that opens the spout, and some tricky manufacturing details that help simplify thing and hold it together well. Due to thoughtful design, all that structural complexity leads to functional simplicity. I'd much rather struggle to model a great product than breeze through the design of a crappy one. I figured out how to use a few new features through this exercise. It seems that I'm getting faster with the program, and it's getting pretty fun to use. I'm also learning about how it's used within organizations and in industry. It has a lot of potential which I have yet to tap, but I'm glad to not have to use all of it's capabilities quite yet. Knowing of them is good enough for now.