(From Mashable) After an 18-year absence, AutoCAD is finally coming back to Mac OS X. Autodesk, the company that makes the CAD program that has become the defacto industry standard, last released a native Mac version of its flagship product in 1992. Not only is AutoCAD coming back to Mac OS X, Autodesk is also bringing an AutoCAD app to the iPad and iPhone. This app will let professionals import, modify and export CAD files on the go. More...

(From Newsweek) In The Bilbao Effect, a minor satire that played off-Broadway in New York this spring, a world-famous architect named Erhardt Shlaminger is caught in a scandal when his design for a wildly cutting-edge building supposedly drives a woman to suicide. Shlaminger, sporting a flamboyant blue scarf and a pretentious accent, is a sendup of a contemporary starchitect. In the best scene, a model of his offending building is carried onstage: a jumble of pointed metal and sharply angled plastic, it looks, says one character, "like a toaster on steroids." But in comedy, as in life, timing is everything. The trend that the play meant to skewer - dubbed "the Bilbao Effect" after the huge success of Frank Gehry's 1997 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain - is just about over. The phenomenon of using iconic architecture to promote a city, an institution, or a real-estate development was a product of the economic boom that began in the late 1990s and ended with the recession in 2008. More...

(From The Onion) Architect Curtis Winter, designer of the planned Fox Plaza strip mall in downtown Topeka, found himself wondering Monday how influential 20th-century Swiss architect Le Corbusier would have approached the retail center. "I could imagine Le Corbusier using more sculptural roof-lines on the Play It Again Sports," Winter said. "And I could see the FuncoLand making a stronger impression from afar and evoking a modernized classicism if it were raised up on stilts." Winter previously made headlines for a laundromat that echoed the abstract geometric designs of I.M.Pei. More...

Another project complete! A new website for Carroll Seating Company went live today.  The new site replaces an older design for the architectural product representative company. One of the fun features are Flash-based staff pages, with ID cards that flip over to reveal bio information and an e-mail link. Our client will be able to add and edit their own announcements and news items through the use of the PageLime, a web-based content management system.

Edward Tumanut is currently traveling in California for a week. Detlef Diercks is currently on a 2-month tour of Asia and will be based in Seoul, South Korea for the next few weeks. Line will continue to work on projects through the magic of the internet (i.e., Skype).

Our latest project, a new website for Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, went live today.  The new site replaces an obsolete design for the University of Central Missouri literary publication.  Highlights of the project include: featured artwork from the publication, subscription and submission links, and a built-in content management system. Our thanks to Wayne Miller, Editor of Pleiades.

(From The Onion) In the oft-overlooked field of stoner architecture, new talent often goes unnoticed. But that hasn't been the case for Minneapolis stoner architect Richard "Dick" Donovan, whose groundbreaking design for an all-foyer mansion is earning slack-jawed admiration from some of the most respected members of the Twin Cities stoner-architecture community. More...

Congratulations to our friends at H2B Architects, who were presented yesterday as winners of the Kansas City, Kansas Chamber of Commerce "2010 New Small Business of the Year Award."

Work Friend Accidentally Becomes Real Friend (From The Onion) - Despite making no deliberate efforts to engage with his coworker beyond the point of pleasant acquaintance, Eric Phipps said Thursday he was astonished to discover he had inadvertently forged a personal bond with fellow web developer Michael Jenkins. Phipps, 31, told reporters that the interactions with his coworker, which for two years had been confined to job-related matters and breezy small talk, first took an unplanned turn toward authentic friendship this past March. According to Phipps, he and Jenkins happened to leave the office at the same time one day and decided to kill half an hour at a nearby bar before heading off to separate evening engagements. More...

We have recently updated and improved upon one of our first projects, the website for H2B Architects. Most significantly, their project galleries have been converted from static pages to Flash. The new galleries feature larger images and slick navigation. Check it out!

Effective May 5, 2010, changes will be made to the preview of Adobe® InContext Editing. Further development in its current state will cease, and the following limitations will be implemented:

    * New sites cannot be registered with the service.
    * New user registrations will no longer be accepted.

InContext Editing will be discontinued as a standalone service in 2011. However, InContext Editing has become a part of Adobe Business Catalyst®, a hosted application for building and managing online businesses that can also import your existing website. Find out more about Business Catalyst and how you can continue to use InContext Editing beyond 2011.

For additional details about the service changes to InContext Editing, please visit our frequently asked questions.

To learn how to easily migrate an existing site with InContext Editing to Business Catalyst, please see our step-by-guide.

(From The Onion) The aesthetic judgment of Paul Gaskill, a graphic designer working on a brochure for Valley View Apartments, was "severely clouded" by a desire to use a new Adobe Photoshop plug-in, coworkers at Blue Moon Design said Monday. "Looking at this brochure, it's obvious Paul just wanted to use the 'wave' frame effect from that new PhotoFrame 2.0 software package we got last week," fellow Blue Moon graphic designer Jared Mahaffey said. More...

Detlef Diercks, one of our founding partners, is joining the team at BlueBike Architecture as Art Director. Congratulations, Detlef!

Though almost unnoticeable to the untrained eye, our website has been overhauled - in terms of file structure, file naming, and cleaner coding. This should make future changes to the site more manageable. We have also added a new section called The Laboratory, a place where we can preview and test new websites, share files with clients and each other, and experiment.

We have added recent websites, including Ultimate-R, as a new project type to our Portfolio.

...A 3D modeling contract, that is!  Line will be producing building models and renderings for a new casino proposal in rural Iowa. Look for images in our Portfolio section soon.

We have completed an ad for H2B Architects, which will appear in an upcoming issue of a local construction magazine. The ad falls in line with the graphic theme we created for their presentation boards.

Alexandra Blatt, one of our founding partners, is leaving us (hopefully temporarily) to pursue a master's degree at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.  Good luck, Alex!  We'll miss you!

Line has signed a contract and started work on a website for the Filipino Cultural Center Foundation (FCCF). The FCCF's site will focus on providing general organization information, plans for expanding their building, and collecting donations.

Today is the first First Friday for H2B Architects.  On display in their new space will be 13 project presentation boards designed by Line.