For architects, engineers, drafters, and designers, depicting their own work is a most important means of presenting themselves to clients and the specialist world. In this context, the quality of a brief explanatory sketch or freehand drawing acquires particular importance, as they are often the only medium through which the work can be explained to outsiders. Freehand drawings are, additionally, an important planning tool that accompanies architects during the discovery of the idea and in the later planning and concretization processes.

Depicting a building by means of freehand drawings makes a number of demands on the draughtsman or woman and naturally requires practice, but this skill can be acquired systematically – for instance by constructing perspectives. Knowledge about materials, aids, and techniques helps the person making the drawing to appropriate existing buildings and to understand their specific qualities better.

These abilities are essential to be able to examine and communicate design ideas. It is precisely the subjective approach involved in freehand drawing that enables one to order one’s thoughts and to concentrate on the important design approaches. This Visual Techniques course forms an important element within the topic of Fundamentals of Presentation.

This course also places greater emphasis on the communicative value of color in architectural space, with a focus on the physiological, psychological, and neuropsychological aspects, as well as the relationships of visual ergonomics. Fashions and trends in color are excluded, as the publication concentrates on substantive references to color in architecture and interior design.

The significance of the materials used in color design is an important new aspect. This aims to sharpen our awareness of differentiated architectural and interior architectural objectives, and to convey a fundamental knowledge of the presence and effect of color and applied color psychology.